When I interviewed Lina Ramona Vitkauskas in September, she mentioned this interview of videopoetry pioneer Tom Konyves that she’d conducted back in February of 2022. Tom kindly agreed to let us publish it after a thorough revision, reflecting his latest thinking. (If you’re reading this in a feed reader or in the email digest, click through for their respective biographies.) I’ve included embeds of the videopoems Tom discusses, but would encourage people who are more visual learners—which I imagine includes a number of our subscribers—to check out his recent talks on YouTube: “Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2020” and “Two or Three Things One Should Know About Videopoetry.”

Despite enjoying the occasional provocation, I’ve never had a good grasp of literary theory, and admire those who do. Thanks to Lina for knowing what questions to ask, and asking them. —Dave Bonta

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: You have said “videopoetry is the poetry of poetry.” Please share more about this idea.

Tom Konyves: In the process of defining and assigning constraints and categories in my 2011 essay, “Videopoetry: A Manifesto” I made a number of what I still consider provocative, challenging statements. One of these key points, in the section “Of Text”, was the following:

Used in a videopoem, a previously composed/published poem represents only one element of the videopoem, the text element. The “poetry” in videopoetry is the result of the judicious juxtaposition of text with image and sound.

What you cite was a statement related to ‘(where is the so-called) poetry in videopoetry’ that I made during a Masterclass lecture, “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace”, that was hosted by the Berlin-based Zebra International Poetry Film Festival on Nov. 22, 2020.

It was my comment on the text element that ended with the hyperbolic quote that you cite above. I had been going round and round about how videopoetry was changing the very definition of poetry, of what makes poetry poetry in our time. In retrospect, I should have used air quotes around the second use of “poetry”. The poetry without air quotes is the poetry that I saw replacing the poetry with air quotes. The poetry with air quotes is the example of any text, including the previously composed/published, i.e. pre-existing poem. As soon as this pre-existing poem enters the videopoem, it loses the privilege of the autonomous object: it becomes only one element of the videopoem, the raw matter/element we describe as the text. Following a successful juxtaposition with the two other elements of image and sound, the resulting effect or experience is a poetic experience, the poetry (without air quotes).

One take-away from this “idea” is that if you’re going to bring some text into a videopoem, even if it’s a pre-existing poem, be prepared for the meaning/context of that original poem to change, regardless of that poem’s original function. That new meaning, if I may reiterate, is the aim of a poetic juxtaposition of text, image and sound, namely, videopoetry.

Finally, to speak of the medium (the film part or the video part) as a “poem” is surely a rhetorical device. By the time Man Ray dubbed his 1926 film Emak-Bakia a “cinépoème”, French critics and filmmakers were already advancing the idea of cinema as poetry. At stake was the autonomy of film and its legitimate place alongside other art forms. On that day in November 2020, our hybrid form was also claiming a legitimate place, this time alongside vispo, langpo, concrete poetry, internet poetry, e-poetry.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: You have cited filmmakers Maya Deren and Sergei Eisenstein in reference to the idea that the poetry film—or the poetry of film—is not linear nor horizontal in movement; in fact, it is vertical because it is “concerned in a sense not with what is occurring, but with what it feels like or what it means.” Please elaborate.

Tom Konyves: The case of the post-war experimental filmmaker Maya Deren is a curious one: on the one hand, her films carried forward the 1920s argument for medium-specificity; in all her works, but most notably the 1943 film “Meshes of the Afternoon” that was described both as a “film poem” and “poetic psychodrama”, text-image relations were never an issue because she, like Eisenstein and her “cinema pur” predecessors, excluded the material presence of words, displayed or voiced. Immediately, I would find it difficult to comment on the relevance of her work to the relatively new – think 1980s onwards – experimental text-based form that I refer to as videopoetry, wherein the presence of text is an essential element.

On the other hand, she was also a film theorist. On Oct. 28, 1953, she participated in a historical symposium whose topic was Poetry and the Film. Flanked by her adversaries, playwright Arthur Miller, poet Dylan Thomas and the critic Parker Tyler, Deren introduced a radical concept that would influence the way we would perceive and identify the poetic moment in a dramatic narrative: in her view, the narrative continuity we expect as viewers is necessarily a horizontal movement, while the poetic is distinguished by its vertical movement; she described it as “a ‘vertical’ investigation of a situation, in that it probes the ramifications of the moment so that you have poetry concerned not with what is occurring, but with what it feels like or what it means.”

Maya Deren uses the example of Shakespeare. Taking Hamlet’s monologue –To be or not to be – she perceives it as outside the action or built upon the action as a pyramid at a certain point as “a means of intensifying that moment in the horizontal development.” When that moment is intensified, it’s a poetic moment. Here and there, along the horizontal development of a play like Hamlet, “there are periodic vertical investigations which are the poems, which are the monologues.”

There are other useful terms for the “incursion” or attack of a vertical investigation to produce the intensified moment. I sometimes use the word ‘interruption’ to signal that the action, the narrative continuity that runs along a horizontal axis, has to be similarly investigated for its poetic potential.

Lastly, the ‘vertical’ is a useful term for any literary activity; when I’ve done a close reading of a short story, I make sure to notice where the action stops and description takes over, effecting what is ultimately a delay of the action. The function here is to create suspense, “suspending” the hurtling of the story toward the end. During the delay, descriptive language often rises to the level of poetry. (I am thinking of the 1995 short story “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Woolf.)

Applying verticality to a particular videopoem should not be taken as a one-fits-all method to interpret works in this genre but it may be worthwhile to discover verticality at work in the singular 2011 “Snow Queen“, a cin(e)poem by the team of Natalia Fedorova and Taras Mashtalir aka Machine Libertine, whose motivation is “the liberation of the machines from their routine tasks and increasing the intensity of their use for creative and educational practices.” In fact, applying verticality to any work should not ignore its binary “opposite”, horizontality; indeed, another set of binary features in this work were foregrounded by the producers as they pointed out the “masculine poem «Poison Tree» by William Blake contrasted to mechanic female MacOS voice”.

“Snow Queen” takes for its soundtrack the text of William Blake’s poem “A Poison Tree” voiced by the Mac OS automated feminine voice Vicky, mixed with Taras Mashtalir’s haunting electronic sound-generated repetitive soundscape (surrounding four notes) for the entire duration of the 6:25 minute work. The four stanzas of Blake’s poem could be seen as the horizontal development of the event described in binary terms in the first stanza: ‘Angry with friend, told friend, anger gone; angry with foe, told not, anger grew.” The next three stanzas further elaborate on the growth into an apple in a garden, the foe then killed under the tree. The voiced text repeats the first stanza numerous times then focuses on the phrases “my friend” then “my foe” before continuing to recite the rest of the poem. Meanwhile, the video track similarly repeats a brief scene from the 1953 Russian film based on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.

The repeated images on the video track are a series of wide, medium, close-up, and extreme close-up shots of the character of the queen in this animated film. The constant motion of these medium-to-close framed images is emphasised by the dilating or expanding eyes of the character.

The angry “look” of the queen supports the theme of the poem, comparing anger-shared vs anger-suppressed. The visual investigation of the theme or subject of the poem is focused on intensifying the moment which holds the text, suspending the narrative continuity in the film. The angry look is a device, similar to the electronic generation of the soundtrack. In this film, the “angry look” is a vertical investigation of selected moments from the appropriated Russian film. The text of Blake’s opening stanza is pounded into the viewer’s consciousness, delivered through line repetition followed by phrase repetition, “intensifying the moment” in a manner similar to the “amplified” image which progresses from medium to close-up to extreme close-up shots.

In any binary system, one element cannot be expressed without the other. Eventually, the first stanza of Blake’s poem is released from the intensifying repetition, enabling the horizontal development of the poem, the remaining three stanzas, to continue. Following a minor repetition at the poem’s last line “my foe…beneath the tree”, the text reverts to the first stanza, reminding the viewer that repetition – as a vertical investigation – will always require its binary opposite, the telling of the rest of the story, to complete the poetic experience of release and relief.

For his part, Sergei Eisenstein was faced with a different compositional problem: “… finding a key to the measured matching of a strip of music and a strip of picture; such measured matching as would enable us to unite both strips ‘vertically’ or simultaneously: matching each continuing musical phrase with each phase of the continuing parallel picture strips – our shots.” Thus, for Eisenstein, verticality or simultaneity are elements in combining music and picture, a very different problem. He likened the horizontal movement or development of film shots to the horizontal, linear development of a “melody” in music, as opposed to the vertical orchestration that produces the effect of a “harmony”. Whether through image theory or music theory, both Maya Deren and Sergei Eisenstein found the idea of verticality a convenient term if you were ‘concerned in a sense not with what is occurring, but with what it feels like or what it means.’

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: Videopoetry exists in what you describe as a pluralist art era (in lieu of the now-passed post-modernist era). What about this era embodies videopoetry?

Tom Konyves: In the late ‘70s and early to mid-1980s, not everyone had access to the resources – the means of production – required to produce a hybrid art form like videopoetry. With mobile phones used for capturing images, the playing field is more level than ever.

In the context of videopoetry, there has always been a concerted campaign to express the many different “meanings” of poetry in as many “forms” as possible, a pluralist approach, to be sure, by the makers but also by the organizers of festivals, the presenters/distributors of works in the genre. For the creators, it’s been “open season” on the basics: what images will best function with the words of a pre-existing poem; where are the words which would best suit a succession of images; should the words be read aloud or written on the screen; should there be words at all? (On that last point, I came down on the side of the poets: yes, there must be an essential element, so let it be words, and – if abstraction is desired – then let it be lettered, as in most of 21st century visual poetry.) It is an aesthtic pluralism that I’m usually talking about, a pluralism that I discovered at work across the five categories of videopoetry, categories that defined the variety of text treatment: kinetic, sound, visual, performance, and animation, but could also be used to define different styles of exhibitions.

Context is everything. In terms of your question, “my” pluralist art era was pointing at the situation of a critic, Danto, yes, but to some extent, myself, as we both examined what could have been a throwaway phrase – the transfiguration of the commonplace – and decided that it served our individual contexts equal to Muriel Sparks’ (in this case the originator of the phrase). In our opinion, the appropriation of the phrase could have opened ourselves to criticism that would then have to be reconciled with a simple appeal to “pluralism”.

For me, that phrase – the transfiguration of the commonplace – became a way to balance competing interests. I am finding that the “anything goes” method of juxtaposition may not always be advancing the genre. (I equate mediocrity with ‘whatever does not advance the genre.’) At the same time, I am happy to equate the “transfiguration of the commonplace” method with the remedy, because the sheer ubiquity of ready-to-hand, “commonplace” elements still requires an unusual degree of skill to select the most suitable detail from the myriad of possible images, texts and sounds to be used for the implementation of having successfully transfigured the commonplace. How? Provide a new context for the image. Or the text. It could entail a “before unapprehended relations of things.”

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: The Russian formalists proposed one should derive meaning not from content but via structure. Please explain how this idea relates to videopoetry.

Tom Konyves: When you find yourself wondering about the nature and workings of a hybrid artform like videopoetry, next to searching out the leading works in the genre, you may want to locate the historical “ism”, like formalism, a “language” that speaks best for those works, identifying their inner form (what you call structure) in hopes of appreciating the ‘performative’ value of what is being presented for your attention.

Of the many “isms” to choose from, I at first felt most at home with surrealism; in fact, when I searched for the most judicious way to describe the function of a videopoem (what the work was meant to do, to accomplish, its unconscious intention) the italicized “process of thought” and “simultaneity of experience” suggested themselves, two absolutely surrealist qualities we would ascribe to a text, not unrelated to the formalist “device”.

So, the surrealists, by way of Dada, and I go way back. It was a commitment I had made long ago. Before I met with the Russian formalists, in a manner of speaking, there was the English critic Clive Bell who developed a theory known as “significant form” around the same time that the Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky devised the concept of “art as a device”. Clive Bell’s “significant form” resonated with me because he envisioned the term as the “subject” of an art form. It was therefore a straightforward leap to envision a juxtaposition such as Gerhard Ruhm’s voice rising and falling with a rising and receding tide in Hubert Sielecki’s Unequal Brothers as a “motivated” example of significant form, openly displayed for the viewer. The ebb and flow of the image smoothed and levelled the binaries in Ruhm’s text.

The Russian formalists did not do away with content altogether in favour of form; their aim was to identify the device which functioned as the vehicle to get the viewer from A to B. They had a term for this as well: it was “baring the device”.

As one who practices of what he speaks, I was very taken with the antics of the young poets in St Petersburg who went by the name of “Futurists”. Under the Futurist poets’ influence, two groups of energetic students of linguistics and literature, in St. Petersburg and Moscow, became the group of writers to be known as the Formalists. Innovation was key for both the Futurist poets who were “making” innovation and the Formalist writers who were championing the Futurists’ works. Rebelling against traditional poetry was very similar to my experience as one of 7 poets in Montreal who named ourselves The Vehicule Poets (after the Vehicule Art Gallery of which we were poet-members).

Led by Victor Shklovsky, the formalists coined a term that introduced the concept of ostranenie, making strange, or as more popularly known, defamiliarization. Like all good innovations that promise wide application, defamiliarization was a response to something lacking in society or in literature; the formalists recognized an attitude, a way of seeing the world, as automatized, a routineness that threatened the aesthetic response. To counteract this automatized attitude, particularly in the arts, the formalists offered ostranenie, making something strange in the artwork, be it a poem, a novel, a film, even music or a painting. Making something strange also required “making art difficult in order to heighten one’s perception” and even extending the duration of the difficulty because, according to the formalists, “the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged for maximum affect.” It was a radical idea; if perception could be changed, triggered by the sensation of defamiliarization, it was possible to arrive at new ways of perceiving the world, to add new meanings to experiences. In the work Some Everybodies, Sarah Tremlett trains her camera on a street corner but renders the scene and the sound in more than half speed slow motion. An everyday scene is instantly defamiliarized, voices become blurred, indiscernible. Narrative space is perceived as strange, compared to real time. (The effect is prolonged for the entire 16-minute length of the work.) Such strange/incongruous juxtapositions in videopoetry are too many to cite.

It is no accident that so far, no mention has been made of the “structure” factor in videopoetry. (As a formalist, I have been busy fulfilling a typical pledge: “impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”) But structuralism is as relevant an “ism” to videopoetry as formalism. It has resonated with me not only because historically it’s an outgrowth of formalism; I can identify with its focus on the relationships in a system because it relates to the “significant form” of the interdependence of videopoetry’s three elements, text, image, and sound.

W.J.T. Mitchell’s version of the formalist/structuralist divide – even as it describes the divide in terms of their impact on literature, not a hybrid form like videopoetry – is worth citing here verbatim:

If form has any afterlife in the study of literature, its role has been completely overtaken by the concept of structure, which rightly emphasizes the artificial, constructed character of cultural forms and defuses the idealist and organicist overtones that surround the concept of form. The replacement of form by structure, in fact, is one way of telling the whole story of twentieth-century criticism. Russian formalism gives way to structuralism.

Is structuralism then the Derridean supplement of formalism?

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: How does videopoetry lend itself to the instability / malleable nature of language?

Tom Konyves: What if one person’s instability is another person’s jazz? If you’re one of the latter, you may be interested to know that Nicholas Payton considers jazz a four-letter-word – if you aren’t prepared to see the word and the genre as ‘European constructs designed to divide, classify and marginalize.’

The wonderful Canadian poet and friend Lionel Kearns once said of poetry that “it’s tricking language into saying something.” (In a recent conversation with Lionel, he suggested I change it to “tricking language into truth” – which has “problematic” written all over it. I would say it’s “tricking language into saying something else.”) What if his statement could be interpreted as: language is so stable it has to be tricked into poetry or that language is so unstable it can always be tricked?

Love, Lord above
Now you’re trying to trick me in love

Rod Stewart, All Right Now (Andy Fraser / Paul Bernard Rodgers)

The simple answer is that videopoetry ‘recognizes’ the instability of language as either the subject for a work or the means whereby the object(ive) is to tamp down on the process to prolong the poetic experience. In other words, instability can be viewed as a positive quality of the work.

Everything that happens in a videopoem happens between the text and the image, between the text and the soundtrack, or between the image and the soundtrack. Like the “poetic experience” that results from the juxtaposition of the three elements, instability can result from the visual context in which the text is presented.

In Janet Lees’ 2014 “The Hours of Darkness“, the text was “found” by the artist on an overnight flight; it was a ‘mix of the cabin crew’s announcements and snippets from adverts and editorial in the inflight magazine’. The “snippets” or fragments were presented superimposed over a fixed camera shot of a wet, dark shed housing seven languid flamingos. (As a group, flamingos are known as a “flamboyance”, a connotation that here presents itself as anything but a flamboyant group; in fact, the birds appear more representative of the opposite definition, restrained, caught on camera in a hyper-real gloomy dankness.)

If the fragments were presented in their original context (sitting on an airplane, reflecting on the surrounding sounds and “texts” in the inflight magazine) the mood would be more in harmony with the text at hand. In “The Hours of Darkness”, the unexpected relationship of image to text allows for a different and possibly more interesting interpretation of the viewing (and reading) experience.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: You have referenced or mentioned the idea that “videopoetry is organized violence on words”. How does this complement—or how is it in conflict with—Derrida’s most fundamental idea of language (words reduced to mere signs, and signs only having meaning when they are in contrast to one another)?

Tom Konyves: The phrase “videopoetry is organized violence on words” would had to have been a modified version of the quote attributed to Russian critic and linguist, Roman Jakobson, who first used the provocative word “violence” in the context of poetry being “organized violence committed on ordinary speech”. (It has also been translated as “organized violence of poetic form upon language.”)

Less well-known, the Czech linguist and aesthetic theorist Jan Mukarovsky used a similar inflammatory statement when he described poetry as the “systematic violation of standard language”. For poetry, he explained, standard language is the background against which is reflected the “distortion” of the linguistic components of the work. (The polemical aim of terms like “organized violence” or “systematic violation” is, I hope, becoming quite clear…) In both, there is the reference to ‘ordinary speech’ and ‘standard language’ – implying that poetry “sounds” different from ordinary, everyday language, so different in fact that only words like “violence” or “violation” could do justice to communicating the effect of defamiliarizing the ordinary, “automatized” reality that manages language by bending it to its will, “organized” and “systematic”. It’s as if we’re describing a political will. We know that Mukarovsky is primarily interested in the difference between the standard and poetic language because he said so:

[T]he theory of poetic language is primarily interested in the differences between the standard and poetic language whereas the theory of the standard language is mainly interested in the similarities between them.

In videopoetry, there is no differentiation between poetic and standard language; both are of equal “value” when selected as the text element. That videopoetry is “organized violence on words” points to the recontextualization of the text element, whether poetic or standard. Especially when the words are of standard, ordinary speech, there is a potential for “transfiguration of the commonplace” when presented through the visual lens that, like Derrida’s contrast between signs, can be said to create a new meaning for the viewer. In “The Hours of Darkness”, the equivalent of Derrida’s “meaning” is created when “ordinary speech”, the word element of announcements on an airplane is contrasted or presented through the visual lens of a shed filled with flamingos. The juxtaposition is in high contrast between two sign types, presenting defamiliarization in the form of a difficulty, an incongruity for the viewer to process, warranting the use of a charged word like “violence” to announce that an intensified perception encounter has occurred. I call that a poetic experience.

Likewise, we can say that videopoetry is organized violence on images. In W. Mark Sutherland’s 2008 Poem in Memory of Jack Donovan Foley, the artist selects five found scenes (images) with sound, superimposes two words, POEM and POET, with arrows pointing these words, one after the other at some point within the image. The five scenes are looped to play also one after the other. Except for one thing. The sound associated with an image (scene) is “pushed” to accompany the next image (scene). Pretty soon, everything is out of sync, including our perception. The scenes loop until they return to the beginning, all is in sync; harmony – of image and sound – is restored. The end. The work poses many questions but it mainly performs for our pleasure (or displeasure). As with Janet Lees’ piece, we have been presented an incongruity to process, our perception has been, to a degree, violated for the sake of the transfiguration of the order we have come to expect in our commonplace lives – a transfiguration into art. 

If Derrida’s deliberate (mis)spelling of differance indicates how a new meaning can be teased out of a distortion of one kind or another, then I would have to “complement” Derrida on his observation by asserting what a difference an “a” makes.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: Elaborate on the element of chance in videopoetry.

Tom Konyves: It was André Breton who discovered in Lautremont’s 1869 prose poem, “Les Chants de Maldoror,” the singular phrase that became foundational to the surrealist doctrine of objective chance: “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” The juxtaposition of Pierre Reverdy’s ‘two distant realities’ could easily be applied to the two distant realities of text and image in videopoetry. But I am most fascinated by the dissecting table; it is the space where the chance encounter occurs, the context of the encounter. The content – any two objects, material or not – could be interesting, for an analysis, let’s say, but ultimately it matters little. In a videopoem, it is usually the image that functions as the context.

Chance is one side of the coin of reality; it is obscured until, at last, a moment of wonder presents itself. It’s unmistakable. In her introduction to the book, “Chance”, Margaret Iversen cites Andre Breton and Salvador Dali on the ‘blindness’ of the camera, that, according to Breton, “gives it access to unconscious material normally only accessible to automatism and dream.” Dali praised the “lashless eye of (the camera) Zeiss – incapable of censorship, naked.”

When I first met George Aguilar, he of cin(e)poetry fame, he who inherited the whole library of the San Francisco Poetry Film Workshop (led by Herman Berlandt), it was in San Francisco for coffee on a street only George remembers – when, suddenly (I’m sure I was in the middle of a sentence, probably very excited to say something to do with videopoetry) a butterfly landed on my shoulder. George, his mouth open, pointed and that’s when I realized that this chance meeting was only the beginning. “Chance and chance alone has a message for us,” says Milan Kundera in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”.

Interesting things seem to happen when ordinary objects – like snow shovels or urinals, like the signs painted on walls or awnings, even fragments of conversations overheard without the effort of listening – when they are displaced from their ordinary world and moved into the more rarefied world of art. Chance operations leading to these displacements, such as Tom Phillips searching out a second-hand book for thruppence, may not always succeed in creating an entirely new version from the materials found. Such is the price of every throw of the dice. Because, as Stéphane Mallarmé famously wrote, A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance.

For one of my early works, I allowed chance to generate the composition with a complex system using three I Ching coins. The “I Ching” (Book of Changes), is a Chinese manual of philosophy and divination. In this ancient system, 64 hexagrams are used as an oracle, a path to the divine. During the summer of ‘79, fellow poet and close friend Ken Norris visited me for a weekend and one night witnessed what was to become the impetus of a new videopoem for which I already chose the title “Yellow Light Blues.” I threw three coins, posing the question, “Is this videopoem, Yellow Light Blues, that I should be working on?” The answer I received was, “You threw Hexagram 30… in this hexagram, six in the second place means… YELLOW LIGHT. Supreme good fortune.” We nearly jumped off our seats. “Yellow Light Blues” became an “expression” of Hexagram 30, a line-by-line construction of the hexagram. Thus, the videopoem simulates the six lines of the hexagram by dividing the work into six sections, each introduced with an image of the corresponding line of the hexagram. The viewer participates in the “construction” of the hexagram, witnessing the work like the work of a bricklayer, one brick at a time.

It is strange to “throw” Harlene Weijs’ 2009 work “1 new msg” in the face of Mallarmé, one of the Symbolist movement’s leading poets, but chance smiled that day on the homegrown Canadian prairie girl living in Toronto, when she set up her camera on a sloping San Franciscan street, lens fixed on a blank wall, beside which an old woman stood, cellphone in hand, trying to “connect”. Weijs’ M.O. was (and I say was because she stopped working at videopoetry soon thereafter) long takes with a fixed camera, text superimposed where possible. “Where possible” is key; Harlene would let people pass til she was sure she could fit text in the gap. In this case, chance provided her with a frame (as we say) you couldn’t buy. The work is about her mother so having the old lady in the frame was heaven sent. How long would it last?

In her introduction to the book, “Chance”, Margaret Iversen could have had Weijs in mind when she wrote of conveying a “slightly estranged visual excitement of the city.” The filmmaker obviously hopes for “a striking composition but she has no way of controlling the outcome. It is this gap between intention and outcome that seems crucial to the meaning of chance in art. The question then becomes: why should artists deliberately set up such a gap in their practice? And why should the viewer find it so engaging?” How long would the old woman stay in the frame? How many “gaps” between passers-by allowing Weijs to pour out a few words of regret for not reaching out before another pack walks by? But she is made of patience, or rather, her camera is. The old woman is the stand-in for her mom. She fumbles with her phone. She fiddles with her bags. She performs. She stays.

In 2005 Harlene Weijs makes “Pure Moment“, her camera fixed on a single maple leaf. (She comments, “Nature in Poetry. Poetry in Nature. Montreal, Canada, 2005”) The leaf is relatively still, so she gets to superimpose the text “i’ll call you when i’m 90” but then! The leaf turns sideways and will not be still…

For one of my earliest videopoems, “And Once They Have Tasted Freedom” I brought my portapak to St Helen’s Island, set up the camera and fixed the frame on 3 sailboats, a postcard image. I thought, I could place some text over this image. I pressed record, stepped back, and lit a cigarette. I needed enough “footage” to work with. After a few minutes, I noticed something strange. In the background, on the other side of a land mass, I spied a ship’s mast moving from left to right ever so slowly past the frame. Here was the missing ingredient, chance (in the form of the unexpected), which had inserted itself in my little world, unbeknownst to me, supplementing what was a too simple picture postcard with “significant form.”

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: Besides yourself, which videopoets, in your view, are elevating the artform?

Tom Konyves: Many experimental filmmakers have paved the way for the names I attach here. But these are the artists of the present time who are responsible for elevating the form. Most of them have found an interesting method to accommodate text and image juxtapositions; many of them have been able to describe the devices they discovered and planted in their works; some of them made us see unexpected new meanings; and a few produced works that spoke of their autonomy without our assistance.

W. Mark Sutherland, Peter Rose, Arturs Punte, Valerie LeBlanc, Sarah Tremlett, Matt Mullins, Adeena Karasick & Jim Andrews, Azucena Losana, Hubert Sielecki, Machine Libertine, Gary Hill, Manuel Vilarinho, Janet Lees, Maciej Piatek, Ottar Ormstad, Alice Lyons, Ralf Schmerberg, Martha McCollough, Guido Naschert, Brandon Downing, Jan Peeters & Paul Bogaert, Young-Hae Chang, Heavy Industries, Pierre Alferi, Javier Robledo, David Jhave Johnston, Yves Bobie Bommenel, Federico Federici, Kurt Heintz, Rich Ferguson, Caterina Davinio, Enzo Minarelli, Gary Hurst, Chris Stewart, David Moore, Katia Viscogliosi & Francis Magnenot, eddie d, Henry Hills, John M. Bennett, Sheri-D Wilson, Heather Haley, Marc Neys (aka Swoon), Elena Simak, Avi Dabach, Dave Bonta, Jane Glennie, Donna Kuhn, Ellen Maybe, Giney Ayme, Joel Baird, Lenora de Barros, Oscar Berrio, Nico Vassilakis, Tamarin Norwood, Xavier Sabater, Ye Mimi, Harlene Weijs, Susan Cormier, Alejandro Thornton, Andrew Gribble, Anna Tolkacheva, Arnaldo Antunes, Aya Karpinska, Billy Cancel, Brady Olson & Patrick Campbell, Claire Trevien, Claire Walka, Dier, Eric Cassar, Eric Gamalinda, Jelena Glazova, Lola López-Cózar.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: What is the most essential part of your Videopoetry Manifesto?

Tom Konyves: For the 2022 exhibition, “Poets with a Video Camera”, the following excerpts were projected on the north wall of the gallery:

(See also the opening question in this interview.)

In its earliest manifestation, it was probably that there had to be the presence of text, voiced or displayed. When this became more self-evident, the identification of five categories provided an objective means to compare and evaluate works in this artform. However, one statement that’s often missed or misprized is that concerning the “poetry” in videopoetry:

When the text is borrowed from a previously composed/published poem, it must be that the artist has discovered a new function for the pre-existing text, based on its juxtaposition with certain imagery, or a certain soundtrack.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: In 2022 and beyond, how do you see advancements in AR / VR and AI technology affecting the videopoetry artform?

Tom Konyves: I was always on the support side of poets and poetry; I argued that videopoetry is a genre of poetry, not film or video. Not to say that Visual Poetry (vispo) hasn’t made the advances that videopoetry has; in fact, when I first opened my copy of the 2012 heavyweight “The Last Vispo Anthology“, edited by Crag Hill and Nico Vassilakis, I was blown away, aside from the gloss, which always helps. I recognized many of the contributors, those who nudged up against videopoetry-making without a fuss, foremost Jim Andrews, whose 2018 collaboration with Adeena Karasick’s text Checking In with his Aleph Null 3.0 is an epic of kaleidoscopic proportions, constructing the only possible frame for a 22 min. work worthy of the name cin(e)poetry. Gary Barwin has dabbled, and John M Bennett is certainly one of the pioneers of cin(e)poetry with his 1987 “The Drive”. Reminiscent of Harlene Weijs, Bennett’s decades-long ongoing collaboration with Nicolas Carras has only improved (see his Street, 2020). Of vispo artists I should mention Ladislao Pablo Gyori, his “wordship” Richard Kostelanetz, whose “word strings” (see at 49:29) were prototypes of what I called kinetic text, W. Mark Sutherland, for whose works (see America, a videopoem, as a recent example) I was compelled to add the supplement category of Conceptual Videopoems to my manifesto, and Nico Vassilakis, whose 5 short works of “video poetry” prompted the Continental Review to announce “Poetry has entered the age of new media.” I preferred his 2007 “toward a” – the harbinger (for me) of vispo and Vassilakis’ magnetic relationship with the alphabet – as we would come to know it. Finally, we should acknowledge and appreciate the contribution of Karl Kempton who has done as much if not more than anyone to introduce “individuals with no or little exposure to the historical streams leading to the contemporary expression named visual poetry.”

Language poetry (langpo) straddles the divide between print and the more recent iteration of e-poetry. Performance is either a slam or a plain reading; sound poetry, of the classic Hugo Ball variety, is an ultra-niche form although it has managed to find its way into some interesting videopoems (check out eddie d for a couple of amusing if not disturbing pieces; for the sheer speed effect, compare with Arnaldo Antunes’ Agora or Oscar Berrio’s Vertigo). If you’re not sure whether the art form of sound poetry can survive the intellectual demands of videopoetry, just watch Matt Mullins’ irresistible “morality-play” Our Bodies or W. Mark Sutherland’s not-quite retort to John Cage’s 4:33, Cutup, featuring the voices of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gyson, a forced incongruity with glue.

The porous border between poetry and AI is probably best exemplified by David Jhave Johnston’s 18-minutes of AI morphs that simply… puts the morph into metaphorms. His AI is Artistic Intelligence and… I have to stop there, you know, the rest is beyond my ken. (I got as far as a Tech Talk with Tyler and had to let it go.)

Then there is E-Poetry whose membership, as far as I can tell, is globally equal in number compared with videopoets but substantially larger in project grant amounts. (Subsidies to poets whose “medium” is print and/or public readings also outnumbers grants to videopoets; our share of the poetry pie is meager compared to other media. The days of commissioned works by private benefactors are gone or at least not on my horizon. Notwithstanding the ever-growing video archive of works on the web, we, the producer-artists comprise a relatively small community; government funding is such that we are just beginning to appreciate our position in our cities if not our countries.)

The three websites I first became aware of were I[heart]E-Poetry.com (no longer accessible), elmcip.net, and ELO (Electronic Literature Organization) where a search for “videopoetry” yielded one result, a Call For Papers for the 2017 Conference.

The e-poetry/videopoetry relationship has not been easy. Consider the following entry from elmcip.net on the topic of the French review “alire” published on 3.5 floppy disks by L.A.I.R.E. (Lecture Art Innovation Recherche Ecriture):

In the 2000s, the adventure of Alire coincided with that of a collective, Transi toire Observable. As the years went by, the authors of alire acquired the conviction that programming was at the center of digital literature and that it was essential to look more closely at the new forms, specifically programmed ones, which it could produce. The founding act of the collective was a manifesto cosigned in February 2003 by Alexandre Gherban, Philippe Bootz and Tibor Papp. This collective opposed itself to videopoetry, which considers programming as a mere tool used for the production of a fixed multimedia object, totally observable and considered as the work. It also differentiates itself from software art, which asserts that the code of the program is the work. For the actors of the Transitoire Observable collective, the multimedia event accessible to the reading, the only legible part of the work, the observable transitory, is only a passing and observable event of an active programmed process, its forms being produced by deeper programmed forms, sometimes even [emphasis added]

And thus, the entry ends with “sometimes even”. Unfortunately, that can happen sometimes even
when the collective “opposes” another medium… chance intervenes… Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… On the other hand, there is vispo.com, a “language sandwhich language” site © 1996-2096 run by Jim Andrews where you can find a myriad of the most interesting and innovative “dishes” served up to the visually curious and the worthy. In fact, it was through vispo.com that I discovered bp nichol’s groundbreaking 1983 work “Letter” (watch it at 1:09).

In my 2022 exhibition, “Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2020”, my main objective was to assemble the most representative of all distinct types of artworks that were produced in the four decades between 1980 and 2020. I selected Andrews’ own “Seattle Drift” as a type of kinetic text that best speaks to the similarities and differences between the two forms of new media poetry:

While videopoetry and e-poetry share the electronic e – consider the videopoetry category of cin(e)poetry – it’s the interactivity of e-poetry that sets it apart. Jim Andrews’ 1997 work is an excellent demonstration of the self-reflexive “command” in lines 5 and 6 that not only expects a response from the viewer/user but in its performance of dispersal recalls the materiality of concrete poetry as it – with its genre – “drifts” away from its position on the screen and away from traditional poetry.