Russian poets

Another Russian poet which I've recently remembered, and have enjoyed listening and reading is a poet called Dmitri Prigov. At the center of Conceptualism and other non-conforming art movements that birthed from Communist Russias attempts to control all aspects of culture. A movement which captured Russian cultures love for dark and irony filled humor, often focusing on the mundanes of life, and twisting and warping propaganda until it lost all meaning. Prigov exemplified that mindset. Himself saying that the emptiness of the soviet message that “this contiguity, closeness, contact with nothing […] is like something that hangs in the air, a self-reliant thing, like a fantastic construction, connected to nothing, with its roots in nothing.” allowed him to be as creative and genuine as possible with his work. Some of his notable works outside of poetry are typographical experiments, which take a few words repeated over and over and make an image or a poster out of it. Similar in nature to the ASCII art plastered around online forums. As for his poetry, I think one series of poems that he made exemplifies his ironic, nonsensical, and comedic poetry, which is his Alphabet series. (this is the 37th in his list) in which this particular poem he goes through the Alphabet, naming lists of individuals and groups who have died. In dong so he performs the poem in a drawling, chant like manner, akin to that of a unhinged monk, possibly because of Soviet Russia's extreme orthodox following. Similarly, however, it is also a comment on how our language is also how our thoughts are shaped. Since when he was asked why all women (“zhenshchiny” in Russian) die in this alphabet. Prigov responds playfully and in commitment to his poem, that if the letter “ж” (“zh” for “zhenshchiny”) did not exist in the Russian alphabet, then the women would not die. Highlighting how the structure of the alphabet dictated the contents of the poem.