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?)
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
Tom Konyves, one of the seven Montreal Vehicule Poets, is considered a pioneer of “videopoetry”, a term he coined in 1978 to describe his first interdisciplinary work, Sympathies of War. He has produced videopoems spanning five decades; his works have been exhibited at every major poetry film festival held in continental Europe, as well as Argentina, Mexico, Canada, and the US. In 2011, he published Videopoetry: A Manifesto; to date, it has garnered more than 30,300 views from 67 countries. It has been translated into Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Bulgarian and Italian. A Retrospective of his videopoems was celebrated in Weimar, Germany in 2020 and Oeiras, Portugal in 2021. Tom Konyves has published 8 books of poetry and a surrealist novella, O.O.S.O.O.M. Most recently, he curated the exhibition and symposium Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2020.
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.