Videopoetry: A Manifesto
I can’t remember what brought it on. Writing all the chapters of an introduction to videopoetry was going to be way too much, even from April 30 until tomorrow — for the first time I had all 4 months off. SO I wrote a MANIFESTO. (It’s very popular these days, have you noticed?)
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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”.
Thanks, Tom. I think this really brings clarity to what works in videopoetry and why. A lot of what you say about juxtaposition, the role of text and sound, and other elements really jibes with my own discoveries both as a curator of poetry videos and as an amateur videopoemographer, even if not everything I like necessarily fits under the videopoem umbrella as you’re describing it here. While “manifesto” implies a certain radicalism or zealotry, I think your approach is more broadly inclusive than that. I personally feel that one-to-one matches of film imagery to textual imagery are a recipe for boredom and bad filmmaking regardless of how we characterize the results, so I guess I see what you characterize as “poetry video” as a bit of a straw man. Yes, there are some videos that fit that definition, but I’m not sure how seriously we should take them.