Vlado Martek - Pre-Poetry
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October 6, 2026
ISBN 978-1-954218-49-9
Eastern European Poets Series #52
Distributed by
Asterism Books (US)
Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
Vlado Martek
Pre-Poetry
Translated from Croatian by
AINSLEY MORSE
Edited and introduced by
BRANISLAV JAKOVLJEVIĆ
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, which build on the strategies of the Zagreb-based Group of Six Authors and other representatives 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.
“At once a radical condensation and total expansion, Vlado Martek’s ‘pre-poetry’ is the point of singularity at the intersection of the apices of two temporal cones: everything leading up to the moment of inscription and the pure potential of everything that can follow. Occupying an impossible position, pre-poetry offers poems that come before the poem, the materiality of the conceptual, and the very real labor of abstract idealism itself. Emerging from a crise de vers in Balkan poetry in the 1970s, Pre-Poetry has much to teach us in our own cultural moment.” —Craig Dworkin
“In the work of Vlado Martek, language shuttles between conventions—of genre, materiality, and authorship—and a bubbling mass of aspirations and longings. With this attentive translation, his restless, passionate writing is at long last available in English.” —Adair Rounthwaite
“In both his poetry and his texts, Martek questions what poetry in fact is, how poetry is possible to begin with, how it comes into being and what poetry makes poetry.” —Dubravka Djurić
“Vlado Martek’s Pre-Poetry proceeds from the proposition that ‘every poem is preparation for itself.’ In this quiet, blank atmosphere preceding any manifestation of poetic language, Martek finds poetry’s magic as well as its tools: pencils, preparation, refusal, honesty. With wit, rigor, and open antagonism toward not only the literal state but the forms that the state uses to replicate itself in poetry, this profound collection looks into the abyss behind the poem and finds—surprise!—the poem: ‘Too bad / that poetry is / everything.’” —Brandon Brown
VLADO MARTEK is a Croatian poet, conceptual artist, and essayist. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was a member of the Group of Six Authors, one of the most prominent collectives on the alternative art scene in the former 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. Martek’s artists books and visual works have been acquired for the collections of a number of museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Mumok in Vienna. Pre-Poetry is his first collection to be translated into English.
AINSLEY MORSE is a translator of Russian, Ukrainian, and former Yugoslav literatures. Her research focuses on unofficial literature and culture of the post-war Soviet period, avant-garde and children's literature. She teaches in the Literature department at UC-San Diego.
BRANISLAV JAKOLJEVIĆ is the author of The Performance Apparatus: On Ideological Production of Behaviors, and the award-winning book Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Managementin Yugoslavia 1945–1991, as well as a number of other books and articles published internationally. He teaches in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University.
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