Two new essays on videopoetry
I have been doing much thinking about Visual Text in a videopoem. Unfortunately, at the rate that my fingers touch the keyboard, I haven’t had much to show for it. But Litlive just posted my essay, Visual Text/2 Case Studies, in which I comment on two of my favourites from the finalists for their VidLit Contest, both in the Visual Text category: “24” by Susan Cormier and “Profile” by R.W. Perkins.
This past year I was also invited to participate in the Zebra Poetry Film Festival Colloquium in Berlin, but had to cancel the visit due a family emergency. A few days before the event, it was suggested I write something to contribute to the discussion. My good friend and former Vehicule poet, Endre Farkas, read it aloud at the Colloquium. It’s now been posted at http://www.academia.edu/3474487/Address_to_the_Colloquium_Berlin_Zebra_Poetry_Film_Festival_2012. In it, I argue that, among other things,
A good videopoem is not predetermined from a script juxtaposed with illustrative elements – it is produced during the editing stage, when the elements are brought together, positioning and duration of text are determined, images and their duration are selected, and sound is chosen, the work is constructed segment by segment, as if they were raw materials in a cauldron. The role of “chance” in this process should not be underestimated or absent.
Editor’s note: For more on Tom and his work, go to TomKonyves.com.
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Tom Konyves was born in Budapest and based in Montreal until 1983. He is one of the original seven poets dubbed The Vehicule Poets, and his work is distinguished by Dadaist/Surrealist/experimental writings, performance works and videopoems. He has published seven books of poetry, most recently, Perfect Answers to Silent Questions (Ekstasis Editions, Victoria, BC). In 2007, he published a surrealist novella, OOSOOM (Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind) with Book*hug, Toronto.
In 1978, he coined the term “videopoetry” to describe his multimedia work and is considered to be one of the original pioneers of the form. He is the author of “Videopoetry: A Manifesto” (2011). As one of the leading theorists of the genre of videopoetry, his Manifesto was reposted on numerous blogs, including W.J.T. Mitchell’s Critical Inquiry, and to date has been accessed on issuu.com by more than 30,000 readers in 67 countries. He has been invited to address festivals, conferences, and symposia in Buenos Aires, Berlin, New York, London, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Athens and Montpellier, among others.
Konyves has initiated many public poetry projects, including Poésie En Mouvement/Poetry On The Buses (Montreal, 1979); Performance Art in Quebec, a six-hour TV series (Cable TV, 1980); Montreal’s first Concrete Poetry Exhibition (Vehicule Art, 1980); and The Great Canadian Poetry Machine (Vancouver, Expo 86). He has curated screenings of videopoems at The Text Festival (Bury, England, 2010) and at the Montpellier Poetry/Translation/Film Conference (2015) and has given numerous poetry performances.
Since 2006, he has developed and taught word-and-image courses: screenwriting, video production, creative visual writing, and the practice of broadcast and print journalism at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, BC. He retired from the university in 2019.
The 2020 International Poetry Festival of Thuringia, Germany and the 2021 Bienale de Poesia International in Oeiras, Portugal, held a Retrospective exhibition of his videopoems.
In 2022, he was guest curator at the Surrey Art Gallery for the exhibition “Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2020” and the symposium “Two or Three Things One Should Know About Videopoetry”.
Much as I like and agree with most of the distinctions you make between videopoetry and other poetry videos, it still leaves me struggling to find a good catch-all term for poetry films and videos that on the one hand are not mere documentaries of readings but on the other hand aren’t slavishly literal illustrations. “Poetry video” seems too broad and “videopoetry” too particular, though I do (mis-)use it in this way in the categorization scheme at Moving Poems. The question I suppose is why, as a poetry video curator, I feel the need for such a category in the first place. I guess it’s all part of my clever scheme to lure in unsuspecting poetry fans searching Google for videos of a certain poet or poem, and get them browsing and thinking more broadly about how film and poetry might work together. Which does seem to have worked for at least some poetry filmmakers who have found their way here, judging from what they’ve told me…