Tom Konyves
Born in Budapest, based in Montreal until 1983, Tom Konyves is one of the original seven poets dubbed The Vehicule Poets; his work is distinguished by Dadaist/Surrealist/experimental writings, performance works and videopoems.
He has published 7 books of poetry, most recently "Perfect Answers to Silent Questions", by Ekstasis Editions, Victoria, BC. In 2007, he published a novella, OOSOOM (Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind) with BookThug, Toronto.
In 1978, he coined the term 'videopoetry' to describe his multimedia work, and is considered to be one of the original pioneers of the form. He is the author of "Videopoetry: A Manifesto", published on Sept. 6, 2011. (see Papers below)
As one of the leading theorists of the genre of videopoetry – his Manifesto was reposted on numerous blogs, including W.J.T. Mitchell's Critical Inquiry, and to date has been accessed on issuu.com by more than 20,000 readers in 67 countries – he has been invited to address festivals, conferences and symposia in Buenos Aires, Berlin, New York, London, Amsterdam, Montpellier, among others.
Between 1983-2006, he was Executive Producer of AM Productions, producing numerous documentaries, music videos, as well as other corporate, educational and government multimedia productions.
Konyves has initiated many public poetry projects, including Poésie En Mouvement/Poetry On The Buses (Montreal, 1979), Performance Art in Quebec, a six-hour TV series (Cable TV, 1980), Montreal’s first Concrete Poetry Exhibition (Vehicule Art, 1980), The Great Canadian Poetry Machine (Vancouver, Expo 86). He curated the screenings of videopoems at The Text Festival (Bury, England, 2010) and at the Montpellier Poetry/Translation/Film Conference (2015) and has given numerous poetry performances.
Since 2006, he has developed and taught courses in screenwriting, video production, creative visual writing and journalism at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He retired from the University in 2019.
The International Poetry Festival of Thuringia, Germany and the Bienale de Poesia International in Oeiras, Portugal, held a Retrospective exhibition of his videopoems in 2020 and 2021 respectively. In 2022, he curated the exhibition “Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2020” and the Symposium "New Art Emerging: Two or Three Things You Should Know about Videopoetry" for the Surrey Art Gallery.
To date, the papers posted here have been accessed by readers from 41 countries...
(According to statistics provided by academia.edu, Aug. 2017)
He has published 7 books of poetry, most recently "Perfect Answers to Silent Questions", by Ekstasis Editions, Victoria, BC. In 2007, he published a novella, OOSOOM (Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind) with BookThug, Toronto.
In 1978, he coined the term 'videopoetry' to describe his multimedia work, and is considered to be one of the original pioneers of the form. He is the author of "Videopoetry: A Manifesto", published on Sept. 6, 2011. (see Papers below)
As one of the leading theorists of the genre of videopoetry – his Manifesto was reposted on numerous blogs, including W.J.T. Mitchell's Critical Inquiry, and to date has been accessed on issuu.com by more than 20,000 readers in 67 countries – he has been invited to address festivals, conferences and symposia in Buenos Aires, Berlin, New York, London, Amsterdam, Montpellier, among others.
Between 1983-2006, he was Executive Producer of AM Productions, producing numerous documentaries, music videos, as well as other corporate, educational and government multimedia productions.
Konyves has initiated many public poetry projects, including Poésie En Mouvement/Poetry On The Buses (Montreal, 1979), Performance Art in Quebec, a six-hour TV series (Cable TV, 1980), Montreal’s first Concrete Poetry Exhibition (Vehicule Art, 1980), The Great Canadian Poetry Machine (Vancouver, Expo 86). He curated the screenings of videopoems at The Text Festival (Bury, England, 2010) and at the Montpellier Poetry/Translation/Film Conference (2015) and has given numerous poetry performances.
Since 2006, he has developed and taught courses in screenwriting, video production, creative visual writing and journalism at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He retired from the University in 2019.
The International Poetry Festival of Thuringia, Germany and the Bienale de Poesia International in Oeiras, Portugal, held a Retrospective exhibition of his videopoems in 2020 and 2021 respectively. In 2022, he curated the exhibition “Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2020” and the Symposium "New Art Emerging: Two or Three Things You Should Know about Videopoetry" for the Surrey Art Gallery.
To date, the papers posted here have been accessed by readers from 41 countries...
(According to statistics provided by academia.edu, Aug. 2017)
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The host of the long running Sunday night reading series Thundering Word Heard at the Café Montmartre, T. Paul Ste Marie introduces the performance.
–Dave Bonta, movingpoems.com
Papers by Tom Konyves
It was lights OUT! Literally. Due to a widespread power outage from an overnight windstorm that shut down the entire gallery, last-minute arrangements had to be made to relocate the event to the Surrey Libraries' Central Branch. Much thanks go to our colleagues there for opening their doors to us on very short notice. Big thanks as well to the ten amazing presenting artists on that day. The video of the event, including my opening address, can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kahoulf16vk&t=8s
When rob mclennan featured the recent resurrection of the magazine on his blog, I was moved to comment on the phenomenon. Follow the links for the original postings.
If we use the phrase "Utopian vision" today to describe the global influence of the Bauhaus, born here in Weimar in 1919, we can also apply the phrase to an event fifty years later, in 1969, when the Portuguese TV Station RTP broadcast (and immediately destroyed) a 2'43" kinetic text work with voice-over on videotape by the experimental and concrete poet Ernesto Manuel de Melo e Castro, aptly titled, Roda Lume or Wheel of Light, which came to be known as the first videopoem. In his essay about videopoetry for Eduardo Kac's 1996 anthology, New Media Poetry, de Melo e Castro writes, "a new medium is at first seen and judged against the medium that came before it."
7 years after "Videopoetry: A Manifesto", here is a short essay written for PoetryFilmKanal Magazine in response to the theme "Poetry Film as Art" that asked the question...
To what extent can a poetry film be labelled a work of art? Did it establish itself yet as a form of fine art? The poetry film scene certainly grants it this status. However, looking beyond it, the status of the poetry film as an independent fine arts form appears to be unclear.
(more on the theme at http://gatomonodesign.de/wordpress/editorial-poetryfilm-as-art/ and https://poetryfilmtage.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Poetryfilm_Magazin_Ausgabe_04.pdf)
After having surmounted the initial obstacle of (avoiding) illustrating a pre-existent poem, new work inadvertently introduced questions about the form's mechanics, specifically (the lack of) evidence of the intentionality and self-reflexivity of image-to-text juxtapositions. In the interim five years, the majority of works in the ever-widening sphere of this genre of poetry became fixated on privileging the complete-in-itself state of the text (most pre-existent poems) over text that takes on a discernible new meaning when juxtaposed with a particular image (or sound effect). In this essay, it is proposed that the selected constitutive elements (text, image and sound) possess collaborative properties, properties that reflect an element's state of incompleteness, in my view the only possible state that enables the emergence of unexpected meanings from image-to-text juxtapositions. As Owen Barfield put it, “What is the very essence of poetry if it is not this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?”
Vincent Dussol est spécialiste de poésie américaine et traducteur de poésie. Adriana Şerban est traductologue. Tous deux sont enseignants-chercheurs à l’Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 et membres de l’équipe EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone.Ouvrage publié avec le concours de l’Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3.
Les Éditions Lambert-Lucas Spécialisées en sciences du langage, les Éditions Lambert-Lucas ont été créées en 2004 dans le but de rééditer des classiques de la lin-guistique devenus introuvables et d’éditer thèses, synthèses, recueils thématiques et actes de colloques. Elles publient une vingtaine de titres par an et sont distribuées par Daudin.
Poésie - traduction - cinéma
ISBN 978-2-35935-263-4, 16 x 24 cm, 360 pages, 39 euros
Tracing the process of that becoming, two divergent approaches should be noted. To revitalize poetry (as we know it) and to address the increasing domination of the visual image through technology-assisted communication and reproduction systems, the majority of poetry-films today are being produced to promote and disseminate a particular, pre-existing poem to a wider audience. The other approach seeks to redefine poetry as the viewer’s experience at the intersection of the word and the image: meaning-production is always situated in inter-relationships; the poem is not in the words or images per se; the word-component (in juxtaposition with the selected images) acquires a new meaning, a change of meaning demanded by the hybrid form.
Despite Robert Frost’s famous statement that “poetry is what gets lost in translation”, some of the videopoems to be presented are in French, Spanish, German and Russian, testifying to the contributions made by translators to ‘reproduce a linguistic utterance in context’, thus directly enabling the prodigious global growth and dissemination of videopoetry and filmpoems since the turn of our century. (These are presented with English subtitles, which is the way I first encountered them.) But for a few significant exceptions, wherein subtitles are used to deliberately subvert the language on the soundtrack (for comedic or dissonant effect), focus that is redirected to the bottom of the screen has the single purpose of facilitating access to the word-component of the work. Attention is diverted from the entire “content” of the original image to the locus of the added text; one is compelled to read where no displayed words were intended. While the viewer is brought closer into the “meaning” of the work – interpreting the inter-relationships between text and image – reading subtitles does inadvertently diminish the integrity of the projected image. For the entire frame is essential to the videopoem, as is the page to the concrete poem, the canvas to the painting, the stage to the play, etc. (I have suggested that subtitles be positioned below the frame.) Alternatively, dubbing the soundtrack with the target language sacrifices the auditory qualities of the original speech in favour of refraining from compromising the integrity of the frame.
Notwithstanding these and many other challenges to unifying poetry and film into a hybrid form, the works to be presented will demonstrate that not only has poetry not been ‘lost in translation’ but has, in fact, reinvented itself; it is the story of a much-anticipated arrival of a new art form we should feel privileged to witness.
In their opening statement, the editors emphasize that 'Poems are not “scripts” for short films. Anyone who misunderstands poetry films as mere film adaptations of poetry will not gain much from them.'
For all 5 issues, go to: https://poetryfilmtage.de/poetryfilmkanal/
Held on Nov. 29, 2015, at the Surrey Art Gallery, the two panels - "Edge City as Space of Exile, Refuge" and "Kinetic City / City in Motion" - included Fauzia Rafique, Cecily Nicholson, Joseph A. Dandurand, Heidi Greco, Sadhu Binning, Taryn Hubbard, Kevin Spenst and myself, in that order.
Each of the eight works (hyperlinked in this essay) is introduced with a description of the work relating its significance to word-image relationships in the emerging genre of videopoetry.
The host of the long running Sunday night reading series Thundering Word Heard at the Café Montmartre, T. Paul Ste Marie introduces the performance.
–Dave Bonta, movingpoems.com
It was lights OUT! Literally. Due to a widespread power outage from an overnight windstorm that shut down the entire gallery, last-minute arrangements had to be made to relocate the event to the Surrey Libraries' Central Branch. Much thanks go to our colleagues there for opening their doors to us on very short notice. Big thanks as well to the ten amazing presenting artists on that day. The video of the event, including my opening address, can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kahoulf16vk&t=8s
When rob mclennan featured the recent resurrection of the magazine on his blog, I was moved to comment on the phenomenon. Follow the links for the original postings.
If we use the phrase "Utopian vision" today to describe the global influence of the Bauhaus, born here in Weimar in 1919, we can also apply the phrase to an event fifty years later, in 1969, when the Portuguese TV Station RTP broadcast (and immediately destroyed) a 2'43" kinetic text work with voice-over on videotape by the experimental and concrete poet Ernesto Manuel de Melo e Castro, aptly titled, Roda Lume or Wheel of Light, which came to be known as the first videopoem. In his essay about videopoetry for Eduardo Kac's 1996 anthology, New Media Poetry, de Melo e Castro writes, "a new medium is at first seen and judged against the medium that came before it."
7 years after "Videopoetry: A Manifesto", here is a short essay written for PoetryFilmKanal Magazine in response to the theme "Poetry Film as Art" that asked the question...
To what extent can a poetry film be labelled a work of art? Did it establish itself yet as a form of fine art? The poetry film scene certainly grants it this status. However, looking beyond it, the status of the poetry film as an independent fine arts form appears to be unclear.
(more on the theme at http://gatomonodesign.de/wordpress/editorial-poetryfilm-as-art/ and https://poetryfilmtage.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Poetryfilm_Magazin_Ausgabe_04.pdf)
After having surmounted the initial obstacle of (avoiding) illustrating a pre-existent poem, new work inadvertently introduced questions about the form's mechanics, specifically (the lack of) evidence of the intentionality and self-reflexivity of image-to-text juxtapositions. In the interim five years, the majority of works in the ever-widening sphere of this genre of poetry became fixated on privileging the complete-in-itself state of the text (most pre-existent poems) over text that takes on a discernible new meaning when juxtaposed with a particular image (or sound effect). In this essay, it is proposed that the selected constitutive elements (text, image and sound) possess collaborative properties, properties that reflect an element's state of incompleteness, in my view the only possible state that enables the emergence of unexpected meanings from image-to-text juxtapositions. As Owen Barfield put it, “What is the very essence of poetry if it is not this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?”
Vincent Dussol est spécialiste de poésie américaine et traducteur de poésie. Adriana Şerban est traductologue. Tous deux sont enseignants-chercheurs à l’Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 et membres de l’équipe EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone.Ouvrage publié avec le concours de l’Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3.
Les Éditions Lambert-Lucas Spécialisées en sciences du langage, les Éditions Lambert-Lucas ont été créées en 2004 dans le but de rééditer des classiques de la lin-guistique devenus introuvables et d’éditer thèses, synthèses, recueils thématiques et actes de colloques. Elles publient une vingtaine de titres par an et sont distribuées par Daudin.
Poésie - traduction - cinéma
ISBN 978-2-35935-263-4, 16 x 24 cm, 360 pages, 39 euros
Tracing the process of that becoming, two divergent approaches should be noted. To revitalize poetry (as we know it) and to address the increasing domination of the visual image through technology-assisted communication and reproduction systems, the majority of poetry-films today are being produced to promote and disseminate a particular, pre-existing poem to a wider audience. The other approach seeks to redefine poetry as the viewer’s experience at the intersection of the word and the image: meaning-production is always situated in inter-relationships; the poem is not in the words or images per se; the word-component (in juxtaposition with the selected images) acquires a new meaning, a change of meaning demanded by the hybrid form.
Despite Robert Frost’s famous statement that “poetry is what gets lost in translation”, some of the videopoems to be presented are in French, Spanish, German and Russian, testifying to the contributions made by translators to ‘reproduce a linguistic utterance in context’, thus directly enabling the prodigious global growth and dissemination of videopoetry and filmpoems since the turn of our century. (These are presented with English subtitles, which is the way I first encountered them.) But for a few significant exceptions, wherein subtitles are used to deliberately subvert the language on the soundtrack (for comedic or dissonant effect), focus that is redirected to the bottom of the screen has the single purpose of facilitating access to the word-component of the work. Attention is diverted from the entire “content” of the original image to the locus of the added text; one is compelled to read where no displayed words were intended. While the viewer is brought closer into the “meaning” of the work – interpreting the inter-relationships between text and image – reading subtitles does inadvertently diminish the integrity of the projected image. For the entire frame is essential to the videopoem, as is the page to the concrete poem, the canvas to the painting, the stage to the play, etc. (I have suggested that subtitles be positioned below the frame.) Alternatively, dubbing the soundtrack with the target language sacrifices the auditory qualities of the original speech in favour of refraining from compromising the integrity of the frame.
Notwithstanding these and many other challenges to unifying poetry and film into a hybrid form, the works to be presented will demonstrate that not only has poetry not been ‘lost in translation’ but has, in fact, reinvented itself; it is the story of a much-anticipated arrival of a new art form we should feel privileged to witness.
In their opening statement, the editors emphasize that 'Poems are not “scripts” for short films. Anyone who misunderstands poetry films as mere film adaptations of poetry will not gain much from them.'
For all 5 issues, go to: https://poetryfilmtage.de/poetryfilmkanal/
Held on Nov. 29, 2015, at the Surrey Art Gallery, the two panels - "Edge City as Space of Exile, Refuge" and "Kinetic City / City in Motion" - included Fauzia Rafique, Cecily Nicholson, Joseph A. Dandurand, Heidi Greco, Sadhu Binning, Taryn Hubbard, Kevin Spenst and myself, in that order.
Each of the eight works (hyperlinked in this essay) is introduced with a description of the work relating its significance to word-image relationships in the emerging genre of videopoetry.
Im Folgenden geht es darum, die richtigen Beschreibungsebenen zu finden,
um Videopoesie von Poesiefilmen, Filmpoesie, Gedichtvideos, Poesievideos,
Cyber-Poesie, Cine-Poesie, kinetische Poesie, digitale Poesie,
Poetronica, Verfilmung von Poesie und anderen sperrigen Neologismen zu
unterscheiden, die irgendwann einmal verwendet wurden, um die Behandlung
von Poesie im Film und Video zu beschreiben, die aber auch unterschiedliche
und divergierende Bedeutungen entwickelt haben.
Die Demokratisierung des Mediums, die durch die Einführung der Videotechnik
entstanden ist, hat in den letzten 25 Jahren die ursprüngliche Debatte
zwischen Kunst und Unterhaltung nur noch verschärft; insbesondere
die Verlagerung der Poesie auf die „große Leinwand“ hat zwei gegensätzliche
Positionen zutage treten lassen: Die eine entmystifiziert das Gedicht durch ergänzende
„Visuals“, die andere steigert die suggestive Kraft der Poesie durch
unerwartete Verknüpfungen.
Die zugrundeliegende Dichotomie grenzt Videopoesie von Werken ab, die
Gedichte im Videoformat (gesprochen oder auf dem Bildschirm) veröffentlichen.
Ich stelle mir die maßvolle Integration von narrativen, nicht-narrativen
und anti-narrativen Verknüpfungen von Text, Bild und Ton als Ergebnis einer
poetischen Erfahrung vor. Werke, die Gedichte im Videoformat veröffentlichen,
sind zwar lobenswert, weil sie der Poesie ein neues Publikum erschließen, aber
ihre Verwendung von Bildern als Verzierung (wenn nicht gar als direkte Illustration)
des Textes, ihre Vorliebe für erzählerische statt selbstreflexive Sequenzen,
ihre Ablehnung von Kontrasten, Fragmentierung, Inkongruenz und
Dissonanz verhindern, dass diese Werke als Modelle für eine neue Gattung
technologiegestützter Poesie gelten können.
The Definition, Categories and Constraints of the Hybrid Genre. Sprinkled with quotes by such luminaries as Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton, Victor Shklovsky, Luis Bunuel and Maya Deren, this polemical essay defined and assigned constraints and categories to differentiate the various manifestations and specificities of the emerging hybrid genre of videopoetry. As the title suggests, it was also conceived as a provocation, an avant-gardist gesture to revivify a conversation between two competing signifying systems. Its insistence on the presence of displayed or voiced text and the renunciation of illustration was a timely response to Ron Silliman’s call for vidpo (videopoetry) and vispo (visual poetry) to ‘define their territory as distinct from the various other art forms that often influence & inform them.’ The “territory” defined by the Manifesto invited poets to seize the “means of production” – technology – for redefining the role of poetry in the 21st century.
C'est une sélection impitoyable ; mon objectif était de présenter avec une sorte de cohérence ma façon de voir le monde et le monde des mots, et comment les deux ne se rencontraient jamais sans qu'un ne laissât l'autre dans son sillage. Les poèmes qui figurent dans ces pages sont les traces de ces rencontres. 2 extraits. Utilisez la vue sur 2 pages pour de meilleurs résultats.
Traducteurs: Antonio d'Alfonso; Vincent Dussol; Nicolas Carras; Teresa Stancioff; et un grand merci à Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd --------
The poems selected for this translation appear more or less in the order they were written over the five decades that began in 1978 when my first book, No Parking, was published by Vehicule Press. It is a ruthless selection; my aim was to present a state of mind that remained more or less how I saw the world and the world of words and how the two never quite met without one leaving the other behind in its wake. It is the traces of these encounters that appear in these pages as poems. 2 excerpts. Use 2-page view for best results.
-Tom Konyves
© Tom Konyves 2017
Cover design/Présentation de couverture: Tom Konyves
Author photo/Photo du poète: Marlene Konyves
All photos by /Toutes les photos par: Tom Konyves
ISBN: 978-0-920320-10-5
ASYLUM Publishing
2588 124B Street, Surrey, BC, CANADA
V4A 3N7
Contact: [email protected]
In his first poetry collection since Sleepwalking Among the Camels: New and Selected Poems appeared in 1998, the meditations that make up Vancouver poet Tom Konyves’ Perfect Answers to Silent Questions are, in turns, heartfelt, surreal and playful, and explore voice, loss and a variety of questions, as well as a life spent wrestling with poetry, and an ongoing influence of the French Surrealists. If you have been wondering what Konyves has been up to all these years, now you know. ~ rob mclennan
These poems are refreshingly straightforward and readable, word morsels that focus us down and ring in our minds’ ears. A film-maker by day, a poet by night, Tom Konyves gives us elegant moments poised between tongue-tip and camera lens. In a medium too often choked up by obscurity and pretension, his writing is refreshing sparse, clear, and memorable. There is a surprising variety of form and approach among these shapely and pointed pieces, but all exhibit a consistency of quality that underlies the strength of this collection. ~ Lionel Kearns
Born in Budapest and based in Montreal until 1983, Tom Konyves is one of the original seven poets dubbed The Vehicule Poets, a group influenced by the avant-garde literature movements and the artistic innovations of the times. His poetry collections include: Love Poems (Asylum Publishing), No Parking (Vehicule Press 1978); Poetry in Performance (The Muses Company, 1982); Ex Perimeter (Caitlin Press, 1988) and Sleepwalking Among the Camels (The Muses Company, 1995). His surrealist novella OOSOOM (Out Of Sight Out Of Mind) was published by Bookthug Books (2007). Since 2006, he has been teaching screenwriting, video production, journalism and creative visual writing courses at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, BC.
Allusions to poets… are woven into meditations that are both fresh and vulnerable. In short, these final fifty pages come close fulfilling Konyves’ own declared desire to create “a temporary object / through which a thought flows / searching for a vantage point / to view the human soul.”
–Journal of Canadian Poetry
"Konyves’ poems are beyond poems, mouthfuls with a surprising aftertaste, and difficult to explain."
– Rob Mclennan
— Ann Mandel, Books In Review, Canadian Literature
- Lionel Kearns
As his title suggests, in Ex Perimeter, Tom Konyves explores boundaries — between poetry and prose, and between art and life. Like American poet Frank O'Hara, Konyves views the poem as a "temporary object," which must be "true/ to the moment." The economy of language here, the proselike cadence, the focus on the "real" world, and on human mortality, are all features of Konyves' writing in this volume.
— Susan Schenk, Unmapped Territory, Journal of Canadian Literature
- John Robert Colombo
So there are also poets around me in whom I see the occasional illuminations of vision. One of these is Tom Konyves, now in Vancouver, whose Selected Poems has just appeared. At the end of his poem "No Parking" we have this visionary passage, which echoes with powerful mythology, then explodes in a series of random and cryptic contemporary images.
- Louis Dudek
The '70s Montreal collective who became known as The Vehicule Poets - Endre Farkas, Artie Gold, Tom Konyves, Claudia Lapp, Stephen Morrissey, John McAuley and Ken Norris - are back, with a new anthology of works.
They were the leading proponents of literary community and poetic experimentation in Montreal.
"In the history of recent English-language poetry in Montreal, the Vehicule group provided a very welcome radical chapter."- George Bowering, from the Introduction"
__________________
check out the website: https://www.vehiculepoets.com/
The combination of descriptive and proscriptive approaches to the defining of videopoetry is appropriate for a manifesto and probably is enlightening for anyone unfamiliar with videopoetry.
The classification of different kinds of poetry-films/videopoems makes an original and very helpful contribution to the taxonomy of the genre.
Etc.
I mention this because my writings on filmpoems and videopoetry owe much to the Formalists; “defamiliarization” is echoed in my Manifesto as “poetic juxtaposition… the ambiguous or enigmatic relationship of a particular image to a portion of text”.
All to say that it was a particularly satisfying feeling to come across the new book published by Taylor and Francis, “The Literariness of Media Art”, which is now available free online!
Delightful to play a part in this exploration of ‘the guises and effects of language as artistic material’!
--
ABOUT THIS BOOK
The beginning of the 20th century saw literary scholars from Russia positing a new definition for the nature of literature. Within the framework of Russian Formalism, the term ‘literariness’ was coined. The driving force behind this theoretical inquiry was the desire to identify literature—and art in general—as a way of revitalizing human perception, which had been numbed by the automatization of everyday life. The authors use literariness as a tool to analyze the aesthetics of spoken or written language within experimental film, video performance, moving image installations, and other media-based art forms, including my vision for "videopoems".
"Videopoetry: A Manifesto"/Vidéopoésie: un Manifeste” and
"In Retrospect: A Manifesto and Its Underpinnings”/“Dans le rétroviseur : les raciness d’un manifeste”
Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd teaches American literature and literary translation at the University of Poitiers. She has published mostly on contemporary fiction, notably on Thomas Pynchon; she coedited Thomas Pynchon with Gilles Chamerois in Profils Américains, Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée (Montpellier, 2014). An interest in the interplay of poetic schemes and narrative has led to her current research on contemporary poets and artists Fanny Howe, Tom Konyves and Gary Hurst, who all experiment in multimedia poetic creation.
ABSTRACT:
The poetry of Canadian poet Tom Konyves offers sketches of urban pastoral in which sounds play a central part. They are constitutive of the environments construed by the poems as well as of the poems as environmental forms. Resting on Susanna Lidström and Greg Garrard’s conception of “environmental thinking” in the poetic process, this paper looks at two poems (a long textual piece and a “videopoem” – a hybrid poetic form bringing together text, image and sound to produce a poetic experience), and examines the ways in which sounds contribute to create the complex environment of the poem, poised between presence and dissolution.
Keywords :Tom Konyves, videopoem, sound, environmental thinking, estrangement, experience, dissolution