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, 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.
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…