About the Work by Ainsley Morse

I almost regret translating Vlado Martek’s Pre-poetry since, for English-language readers, these texts now appear as complete and seemingly coherent text-objects (even—“poems”), when in fact the sneaky truth of their nature is hiding in the dense thickets of words or, alternatively, the deceptively clean white spaces in which they reside.

When I first saw the small and elliptical poems (“pre-poems”) of the first section of Pre-poetry, I was reminded of Vsevolod Nekrasov’s early minimalist-concrete poems, written “for the drawer” in the Soviet 1960s. Nekrasov saw himself making poems in an environment of extreme scarcity: Soviet usage had nullified large swathes of the language one might use to make poems, so the poet’s task was to carefully winnow out the usable material. The resulting poems are spare and seemingly simple; their minimalist form contrasts sharply with the more garrulous and grandiose official poetry of the time.

Some of Martek’s statements in Pre-poetry seem to echo a position similar to Nekrasov’s vis-a-vis the poet’s ethical responsibility toward language as the material of poetry, and the search for a kind of purity through radical reduction. In one of his dense prose “texts on pre-poetry,” Martek declares that “pre-poiesis is an ethical domination over poetic content, / pre-poiesis is content that happened in language rather than in the poet.” 

From the perspective of translation, the minimalist qualities of these “pre-poems” in the first half of Pre-poetry make them alternately very easy and very hard to translate. As with Nekrasov’s poems, some seem to allow for miraculous word-for-word translational equivalence, in others every single word seems impossible to reproduce in English, and most more lie somewhere in between.

Pre-poetry is preoccupied with language and what language does in poetry, but its other, possibly greater concern circles around the figure of the organizing personality, the hand that picks up the pen to do the writing. For Martek—a conceptual artist—there is no poetry or pre-poetry without the (pre)poet and his preparations for and ruminations about the practice of writing.

This position places the translator in an interesting position, since it directly calls into question the traditionally fetishistic relationship to the poem as a deliberately and exquisitely made object, the product of individual poetic genius. For Martek, the poet is paradoxically the organizing center of all this poetic and pre-poetic activity, but what is being documented is the activity itself. There is thus a throwaway quality to the “poems” that destabilizes traditional attitudes toward not only poetry and translation but also the notions of a “poetry collection” and, of course, a “poet.”

Martek’s pre-poems evince a skepticism toward poetry and language per se that surpasses Nekrasov’s grim but stubbornly optimistic experimentation. The pre-poems perform the extent to which the poet (pre-poet) is stuck in the world created by poetry, its terminology and rules for usage: “poetry is turning into truth / I’m waiting for that to pass.”

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VLADO MARTEK is a Croatian poet, conceptual artist, and essayist. In the 1970s and 1980s, when Pre-Poetry was first published, he was a member of the Group of Six Authors, which was one of the most prominent collectives on the alternative art scene in Yugoslavia. Martek’s poetry is distinguished by its conceptualism, its integration of visual and linguistic elements, and by its minimalism. In post-socialist independent Croatia, Martek’s work became sharply critical of an increasingly neoliberal society.

AINSLEY MORSE teaches in the Literature department at UC-San Diego, and is a translator of Russian, Ukrainian, and Yugoslav literatures. Her research focuses on unofficial literature and culture of the post-war Soviet period, avant-garde, and children’s literature. Selected publications include the monograph Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children’s Literature (Northwestern UP), Vsevolod Nekrasov’s I Live I See (with Bela Shayevich, UDP) and Dušan Matić and Aleksandar Vučo’s The Fine Feats of the Five Cockerels Gang (with Aleksandar Bošković, Brill). She’s especially grateful to Branislav Jakovljević for his contributions to Martek’s book.