Pre-Poetry

Vlado Martek's ars poetica combines minimalism and conceptualism in a theoretically-driven wrestling match between the materiality of writing and the metaphysics of poetry. Pre-Poetry collects Martek's short poems, mini-essays, and visual and performance works from the late 1970s and early '80s. Martek's work of this period builds on the strategies of the Zagreb-based Group of Six Authors and other representatives of the second generation of conceptual art and experimental poetics in Yugoslavia. For Martek, 'pre-poetry' engages the material foundations and physical effort of the work of poetry. In a certain sense analogous to 'non-art' in visual arts, pre-poetry also calls attention to throwaway phrases, linguistic cliches and ambiguities, and the visual aspects of language. Rejecting generic categories of visual and concrete poetry, Pre-Poetry reveals Martek's intriguing connections with poets and conceptual artists from other parts of the world and marks the first major English-language publication of his poetic output.