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, 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.
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.