In Retrospect: a Manifesto and its Underpinnings
Last summer, I was invited to present a keynote address to the Poetry/Translation/Film conference organized by the University of Montpellier. Like a tour guide, I selected 19 videopoems, introducing each one. The venue was the Utopia, an aging, funky little cinema.
A few months ago, the organizers contacted me that they intend to publish a book of the proceedings and they were going to include my Manifesto, translated into French. Could I add a text “in which you look back on what you wrote then, say if there is anything you would revise if you were to rewrite your manifesto now, tell the reader of any developments between now and then, and what you foresee for the future?”
The questions were apt, as it occurred to me that it was around this time, 5 years ago, that I began writing what turned into the Manifesto. So here it is.
For those who may have trouble accessing Academia.edu, here’s the same PDF, uploaded with Tom’s permission to Moving Poems. —Ed.
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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”.
Good stuff. As a non-systematic thinker myself, I appreciate the clarity you bring to these issues, and I find myself more in agreement with you as time goes on. This time around I found myself nodding most vigorously to the bit about incompleteness and accommodating spaces.