Posts By Tom Konyves

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.

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.

Address to VideoBardo 2104: Ocho Videopoemas

(Para leer la traducción en español, consulte la versión bilingüe de este trabajo en academia.edu.)

I hope that my selection of these Spanish-language works for VideoBardo 2014 will demonstrate that a successful videopoem will always transcend language and cultural boundaries; these eight artists are universal artists, well-versed in the art forms that have emerged with the technological advancements of our time; as well, they all possess the profound, innate understanding of what I often refer to in this genre as poetic juxtaposition.

At its best, videopoetry frames the fragmentary nature of our contemporary lives. It does not illustrate this vision as the happy encounter of words, images and music; it does not exploit or celebrate the technology that enables it to be experienced; videopoetry, as I see it, is a form of aesthetic expression that only reveres its elements – the word, the image, the sound – when each brings to the work what the others lack. For each of these elements, I believe, are inherently incomplete before brought into juxtaposition with the other two. Once juxtaposed, these incomplete elements acquire an entirely new function – what may have originated with a well-meaning text, a seemingly unrelated image or a captivating soundtrack, is found to present a new meaning, an unanticipated revelation, a videopoem.

 

Javier Robledo, POESIA (2007)
Ileana Andrea Gómez Gavinoser, COSMOS EN FORMACION (2006)
Alejandro Thornton, O (2014)
Dave Bonta, LAS OYES CÓMO PIDEN REALIDADES (2009)
Oscar Berrio, VERTIGO (2010)
Dier, TODOS ESOS MOMENTOS SE PERDERAN (2011)
Azucena Losana, LoCo PAPARAZZI III (2009)
Lola López-Cózar, EL ETERNO RETORNO (2013)

 

Javier Robledo’s 2007 performance-poem is structured in 3 parts. In the first, the poet/artist follows a magical “bulging” that is occurring along a typical cobblestone street. He discovers one perfect 6-sided cobblestone; painted on each of its 6 faces is a letter that, when held and turned by the hand of the artist reveals its new identity – the word, P-O-E-T-R-Y. Like throwing dice, the stone is thrown by the artist, picked up and examined (lovingly, I might add) then thrown again.

What comes to mind is Stéphane Mallarmé’s visual poem, “A Throw of the Dice”. Robledo is thus associating POETRY with both chance and play.

In the second part, the magical aspect of “poetry” is emphasized by reversed motion film: the stone appears to be rolling back to the hand that had thrown it. Text (the word POETRY painted and spelled out on the stone) and image (the stone rolling forward, then rolling backward) are integrated to produce a poetic experience.

In the third part, the stone is shown exhibited on a pedestal pushed back into a corner of an art gallery or a museum; it has become an object to be experienced at a distance, by a public whose presence is only implied by chattering voices heard on the soundtrack. Robledo’s comment suggests that poetry – living poetry – is exemplified by action, by chance, by play. It does not belong in a museum with other dead objects. It must be experienced in our everyday lives, in our streets, in our hands.

 

In Ileana Gavinoser’s Cosmos en Formacion three techniques of art-making – painting, collage and animation – are presented as a visual metaphor for the formation of the universe. What completes or fixes this work in the rectangular frame of the screen is the ingenious addition of a reverberating effect to the narration of an androgynous creator – in the “form” of two overlapping voices (male and female) – rendering this version of the creation myth as if delivered from “outer” space.

 

One distinction I have observed between a pure videopoem and most “poetry videos” is the presence of self-referentiality. Nowhere is this aspect better exemplified than in Alejandro Thornton’s minimally titled work, O. It opens on a locked-off shot of a moving landscape stamped at the centre with a gigantic letter O. After 12 seconds, the frame containing the image slowly begins to rotate. In its revolution about the fixed sign of the letter O, the moving landscape is reduced to a demystified representation of any image displaced from our screen. This videopoem not only performs the function of a traditional concrete poem (presenting meaning by its physical shape), it demonstrates the collaborative property of the image. Self-referentiality removes the narrative propensity of the work; the moving landscape loses its original meaning in favour of the word (in this case the letter O representing the world, or at least circularity).

 

It is becoming evident that one of the primary sources for the text element is a previously published/written poem. Dave Bonta’s adaptation of a Pedro Salinas poem presents what I am seeing as a critical question for the genre of videopoetry. If the poem written-for-the-page was perfect, the best words in their best order, so to speak, was the motivation to appropriate the poem based on the notion that a new platform/medium was in order to disseminate the work? Alternately, using the poetic juxtaposition of visual and sound elements, did the filmmaker discern a specific attribute or collaborative property of the poem that could be subsumed in the new, original work? I think Las oyes cómo piden realidades was a result of the latter. In this videopoem, the image of a nest of snakes provides a constrained visual metaphor for each reference to “they” “these” and “them” in Salinas’ reading: “these wild and dishevelled ones” “they beg” “they can’t go on living” “help them” etc. One lasting impression that differentiates a “pure” videopoem from any other “poetry video” is that you will always associate the text you read (or hear) with the image(s) and the soundtrack it was created with. After viewing this work, how can we not help but associate this poem by Pedro Salinas with a nest of garden snakes?

 

Oscar Barrio’s Vertigo opens with the sound of two blasts of a train’s whistle and the footsteps of a man walking. What follows is the rapid-fire voiced repetition of the word “abismo” (abyss) interjected with fragmented phrases, a virtual torrent of words. Juxtaposed with the fast-paced soundtrack is the silhouette of a man walking from left to right across the screen superimposed on an over-exposed color-saturated image of train cars speeding in the opposite direction. For me, this 73-second work best exemplifies the function of a videopoem – “to demonstrate the process of thought …”

If one were to search for meaning in the fragmented phrases of this veritable stream-of-consciousness, it could be found in the nutshell of Nietzsche’s Aphorism No. 146, “When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

 

I have written extensively of the Madrid-based graffiti artist Dier’s videopoem, All These Moments Will Be Lost. Appropriating what at least one contemporary philosopher referred to as “perhaps the most moving death soliloquy in cinematic history”, Dier makes a case for interpreting graffiti and its removal as the loss of memory among the disenfranchised in the world. It is also a case for an indirect form of narrative storytelling, juxtaposing images of the real world with the sorrow expressed in fiction; in this videopoem, Dier suggests that truth and fiction are not only equal in their strangeness but also partners in the struggle for change.

 

Between 1930 and 1933, the Surrealists published 6 issues of the periodical “Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution”, marking a significant transformation of the movement that began with the introduction of the irrational to the art practices of writing, painting, sculpture, performance and film. Political and social activism became the focus of many artists who shared the movement’s methodology as well as its expanded ideology. Asucena Losana is no stranger to political and social activism. Appropriating Bolivian poet Oscar Alfaro’s famous poem-fable, The Revolutionary Bird, for its soundtrack, this videopoem illuminates the poem’s allegorical meaning in a singular image of a homeless man sitting against the wall of his sidewalk, surrounded by his belongings stuffed in plastic and burlap bags, the focalized subject whose animated loco gestures appear to blend with and inevitably articulate the impassioned reading of the poem. Associating the gesticulations with the voice on the soundtrack exemplifies Andre Breton’s statement, that “Bringing together two things into a previously untried juxtaposition is the surest way of developing new vision.”

 

To conclude this program of 8 Spanish videopoets, I selected el eterno retorno from the prolific Lola Lopez-Cozar. Breton’s “new vision” is here exemplified by the juxtaposition of a slow relentless ascent of words with a dark score of orchestral and choral music. Simultaneously, we witness as rain falls, its hundreds of hard-hitting drops mimicking the punctuated end of each sentence that is moving in the opposite direction. Each line of text presents a new attempt to name the unnamable meaning of time and loss. It is a relentless list of attempts, punctuating the end of every attempt with a period. The repeated refrains of the choir invoke an epic moment – the return of the king in a classical fairy tale – but the orchestral treatment also speaks to another return, the cyclical myth-concept of the “eternal return”; this title, the subject of the work, is viewed through the doubled image of hard rain falling, text rising with the rhythm of the chant – all enveloped in the viewfinder of a video camera, flashing its record button to remind us that, after all, this is a work limited by its own time, the time it takes to experience a videopoem.

Address to the Amsterdam ReVersed Poetry Film Festival Symposium, April 4, 2014

Here’s the full transcript of Tom Konyves’ address; see the main site for the video shot by Alex Konyves. Tom gives a very personal introduction to the concept of videopoetry, using examples of his own work as a videopoet to illustrate some of the points he’s long been making as a critic and theorist. I have added just a few links. —Dave

Thank you Yan, Linda, Anne for the opportunity to address the ReVersed Poetry Film Festival Symposium.

I was asked to introduce the genre of videopoetry with my own work.

I won’t be able to talk about the meaning of my videopoems, as it’s always subjective, always in the eye of the beholder. What I can talk about is their structural form and how I came to discover the process of assembling, the strategies I employed, specifically in my early works.

You may not be able to tell, but I wear two hats. The first is for the poet who can mix text, image and sound and design a new condition for the poetic experience. The other is for the observer-critic who reflects on what is being seen and can tell us about these works, how they relate to the world they are presenting as a new world. It is the critic who asks, What makes this work different from a really good printed poem? or Will you always associate the images on the screen with the words you heard or read? and Where is the poetry in this work?

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.

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?)

A Brief Summary of Videopoetry

Cross-posted from Vimeo. See also The Vehicule Poets.

I’ve always been interested in experimental poetry, that is, exploring new ways to express an old form. I began by creating visual poems on the page as well as combining poetry with performance art. When I produced my first “videopoem” in 1978, I was a member of an artist-run gallery, the Vehicule Art Gallery in Montreal, where I was witnessing the advancements in painting, in installation and performance art, in graphic, multi-media and video art, so it was almost natural for me to experiment with video. I no longer saw poetry as limited to the printed page. Over the years, I produced numerous videopoems, which led me eventually into the video production field, where I began writing and producing documentaries, as well as other commercial work.

These days I am in the process of completing my research on materials for an examination of videopoetry (or filmpoems, as they were referred to in an earlier time). I began producing videopoems in 1978; now more than 30 years later, I find myself teaching a course in “Word and Image” at the University of the Fraser Valley here in BC, Canada. For the past 2 years, I have travelled to various archives in Berlin, Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Toronto, taking notes on the work I encountered, eventually arriving at a workable definition and five main categories of the genre.

Videopoetry is a genre of poetry displayed on a screen, distinguished by its time-based, poetic juxtaposition of text with images and sound. In the measured blending of these 3 elements, it produces in the viewer the realization of a poetic experience.

The poetic juxtaposition of the elements implies an appreciation of the weight and reach of each element; the method is analogous to the poet’s process of selecting just-the-right word or phrase and positioning these in a concentrated “vertical” pattern.

To differentiate it from other forms of cinema, the principal function of a videopoem is to demonstrate the process of thought and the simultaneity of experience, expressed in words — visible and/or audible — whose meaning is blended with but not illustrated by the images.

***

In its early stages, “poetry film” used text to illustrate the soundtrack (for example, the vocal performance of a poem whose text is simultaneously presented on the screen) or illustrated the text with images which are easily identifiable with their verbal references. It has also been used to describe recorded performances at poetry readings and, in many cases, music videos with poetic elements.

***

There are 5 principal forms of videopoetry, including a combination of any of these:

KINETIC TEXT
VISUAL TEXT
SOUND TEXT
PERFORMANCE
CIN(E)POETRY

KINETIC TEXT is essentially the simple animation of text over a neutral background. These works owe much to concrete and patterned poetry in their style — the use of different fonts, sizes, colours to create unusual visual representations of text.

VISUAL TEXT, or words superimposed over video/film images, presents the most significant challenge to the videopoet — to integrate the 3 elements. The role of the videopoet is to be an artist/juggler — a visual artist, sound artist, and poet combined — to juggle image, sound and text so that their juxtaposition will create a new entity, an art object, a videopoem. Text can include “found text”, i.e. image as text.

SOUND TEXT, or poetry narrated over video/film, is the videopoem without “superimposed text”. The “text” of the videopoem is expressed through the voice of the poet, accompanying the video/film images on the screen. Of the five forms of videopoetry, SOUND TEXT — with or without music — is the most popular; essentially, this is due to the facility of working within the traditional form of video/film, i.e. using the narrative techniques of the medium — without the additional difficulty presented by visual text — to illustrate a previously written poem. Once the illustrative function is removed, the work appears as the non-referential juxtaposition of sound and image.

PERFORMANCE is the appearance of the poet, on-camera, performing the poem. Some poets will mimic the MTV-music video style of presentation.

CIN(E)POETRY is the videopoem wherein the text is superimposed over graphics, still images, or “painted” with the assistance of a computer program. It closely resembles VISUAL TEXT, except the imagery is computer-generated, not captured by a motion picture camera. The term was introduced by George Aguilar, who works most often in this form.

***

In addition to image and sound, text is THE essential “element” or raw material of a videopoem, implying a differentiation from the ‘poetic film’ which relies, almost exclusively, on the visual treatment — the composition and editing of the images — in contradistinction to its verbal treatment. Indeed, the text, whether displayed on the screen or heard on the soundtrack of a videopoem, need not be an appropriation of a previously published poem.

What differentiates videopoems from poetry-films today is the use of non-poetic texts to effect the experience of a poem — my interpretation of Maya Deren’s “verticality” — in which the text, when extracted and examined as an independent element, can not be identified as “poetry”. The poetry is the RESULT of the juxtaposed, blended use of text with imagery and sound.