Before there was Kenny Goldsmith, there was Dmitri Prigov. Conceptual poets emerged in the 1970s in the old Soviet Union as the answer to multiple problems: (1) how to pursue a career when the state monopolizes the means of production and only publishes the most conservative poets imaginable, (2) how to write critically even of the post-Stalinoid Communist Party without committing suicide or consigning oneself to internal or external exile. When I was in what was then Leningrad in 1989, Prigov was surrounded by a posse of younger poets, distributing “poems” that had been torn to pieces and then sealed into envelopes. You could, in theory, tear open the envelope & piece together the original text, tho in practice I never met anyone who had done so. Like Goldsmith, Prigov appeared to practice a poetics that didn’t require reading in order to “get it,” and which proved useful in throwing situations into new social frames that rendered them visible in new ways.

But that was then and this is now. The old Soviet context is gone, even if the current government in Russia appears every bit as enamored of limitless central power as does its counterpart here in Washington. Gauging from Fifty Drops of Blood, or – to use the fuller title – Fifty Drops of Blood in an Absorbent Medium, published a year or two by Ugly Duckling Presse, Prigov has made the transition not only from the Bad Olde Bloc of Actually Existing Socialism to the current age of economic and political decline.

Fifty Drops is a series of 50 short untitled free verse pieces, mostly in the four- to seven-line range, each of contains some reference to a drop of blood, e.g.

Ice-cold vodka between the windowpanes
The faint crackling of bare wires
A lynx, turning into a girl with a drop
           of blood in the corner of the mouth

Or

Uatsrior, an intelligible beast of vengeance
For some reason the ballet
slippers of Anna Pavlova recall
A drop of blood behind a teddy bear’s ear

Or

Tiny swastikas on the wedding sheets
A drop of blood on a ring finger
Pure, as a rabbit fur
        collar, existentialness

The reiterated phrase is at least plausible wherever it occurs in every poem. Together, however, it creates a thread of connection between the poems that feels entirely arbitrary, almost Oulipo-esque, like a novel in which every character walks with a limp or has one green eye. That perpetual & reiterated oddness strengthens these poems as poems &, at points, rescues some that otherwise don’t seem to work, tho I can’t tell here if that’s a feature of the poems themselves or merely the translation. The poems are given in Russian and English on facing pages, but my Russian is at the “sign recognition” stage at best.

Prigov’s resilience, tho, strikes me as noteworthy. So much of conceptual poetry – conceptual art of all media – is involved in framing its own context, revealing assumptions, highlighting the conundra that surround any art in any society that one can hardly envision it surviving the kind of convulsions that have transformed the Soviet Bloc since 1988 or thereabouts. One might anticipate it seeming as quaint as 1930s Socialist Realism, maybe with a little more humor. So to see a major – perhaps the major – practitioner doing just fine, thank you, nearly two decades after the old context was ripped away is a testament to his own powers as an artist, whether or not this is a great volume. One wonders, for example, if Kenny Goldsmith’s Day, retyped from an issue of The New York Times, could survive in the same world twenty years from now if The New York Times itself did not, and what that might mean. Prigov shows himself to be capable of that challenge.