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- Tom
Konyves, Videopoetry
BIO
BOOKS
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY
AN INTERVIEW WITH TOM KONYVES
VIDEOPOETRY
1978-1993 VOLUME 1 (The Program)
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SYMPATHIES OF WAR (1978)
MUMMYPOEM (SYMPATHIES OF WAR - A POSTSCRIPT)
YELLOW LIGHT BLUES (1980)
AND ONCE THEY HAVE TASTED FREEDOM (1981)
QUEBECAUSE (1982)
SIGN LANGUAGE (1985)
PERCUSSION 16 MM FILM B&W (1993)
HOPSCOTCH 16 MM FILM B&W (1993)
How to Order this Video
Tom Konyves is a video producer and poet currently residing in Crescent Beach, BC, with his wife Marlene and their three children. Based in Montreal until 1983, his poetry has evolved from his mid-seventies association with the Vehicule Poets' group —a period distinguished by Dadaist/experimental writings, performance works and videopoems —to the reflective and almost delicate work created in the later Vancouver poems.
In 1978, he coined the term "videopoetry" to describe his multimedia work. The 1993 Nuage Editions book, Vehicule Days, details his involvement with the Montreal group of experimental poets. In1999, the Edgewise Café selected him as People's Choice at the First Videopoetry Festival.
Love Poems, Asylum Publishing 1976
No Parking, Vehicule Press, 1978
Poetry in Performance, Muses Co. 1982
Ex Perimeter, Caitlin Press, 1988
Sleepwalking Among The Camels, Muses Co. 1994
on No Parking
Immortal brevities! 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
on Poetry in Performance
Konyves is after large collaborations: between sight and sound, form and content, environment and art, poetry and technology, conception and performance, the audience and the poet. Removing words from a linear context is part of Konyves' war of imagination against rationalism: war against any hard line, political or artistic, which is exclusive or divisive. Books in Review .
on Ex Perimeter
Fascinating, encouraging, delightful. Here is honesty, genuineness of mind and of poetic delivery. Several of these poems are little masterpieces. Louis Dudek
Konyves relays an authentic voice in well-carpentered passages... short, from the heart epiphanies one finds marked with peculiarly urban tenderness; back alley kind of poems that cue on the localized imagery of a Montreal lane, a cemetery, a lover's bed. Konyves has a precise eye for detail and he strives for meaning in his observations. There is contentment with the ordinary, tribute to birth and death, to change of landscape. The Vancouver Sun
The poems in Ex Perimeter are sparse, clear, direct and full of delicate and precise insight. Whenever I read them I say to myself, "Yes, that is it, exactly." In this life of mine which is too often out of control and beyond reflection, these poems bring me to a sudden stop. "Pay attention," they say, "to the moment, to experience, to what is." Lionel Kearns
on Sleepwalking Among The Camels
Tom Konyves’ strong experimental impulses and wide range of technical skills produce some remarkably successful poems… both his selections from Ex Perimeter (1988) and his most recent material in the section Into This Space represent the work of a skilled poet who is finally coming into his own. The diversity of this material stands out even to the casual reader. Konyves displays an extraordinary sensitivity to rhythm…
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 PoetryKonyves’ poems are beyond poems, mouthfuls with a surprising aftertaste, and difficult to explain. Rob Mclennan
TOM KONYVES VIDEOPOETRY 1978-1993 VOLUME 1
COST: $95.00 US
"Running Time: 43 minutes"
Includes VHS video, texts of poems, and additional documentation
PROGRAM
SYMPATHIES OF WAR (1978) 10 MIN.
The concept for this first "videopoem" was the recording of the performance of the poem. The text of the poem contained interjections of "STOP, STOP" which were yelled, whispered, pleaded, called out by Endre Farkas. A series of slides (interior details of a STOP sign and a DANGER sign) were rear-projected onto a screen behind which I sat in profile, leaning in and out of the "frame" of the camera which was fixed on the slides. The narrative concerns th contents of a letter sent to a woman whose daughter (Carmen) has died in war. The cryptic text mimics the form of censored letters; the punctuation of STOPs throughout allude to telegraphic messages.
This visual collage of slides, live action, and text was one of the first in the medium of "videopoetry", a classic example of the genre.
MUMMYPOEM (SYMPATHIES OF WAR - A POSTSCRIPT) (1978) 6 MIN.
Extending the investigation of the form (videopoetry), the work explores the act of writing, literally. The frame, as in Sympathies of War, is frozen, "mummyfied": it is the close-up the VTR, the lens focused on the moving needle of the audio level meter, as the video of Sympathies of War is playing. The sound is the sound from the video. A 3"x5" tear-off writing pad is underneath the meter. Lines are written on the pad, torn off, new lines are written; it is a performance in real time. Words are written, parts crossed out to form new words, new contexts.
The poetry here is the revelation of the live writing juxtaposed with the "mummyfied" version of the original poem, a video playing on a machine.
YELLOW LIGHT BLUES (1980) 15 MIN.
The structure of this videopoem is based on the I Ching, a Chinese manual of philosophy and divination; 64 hexagrams are used as an oracle, a path to the divine. Here, the six lines of Hexagram 30, known as Li, the Clinging, Fire, provide the 6-part punctuation for the piece.
This work continues the use of vehicular imagery (i.e. The Vehicule Poets) in the performance Drummer Boy Raga: Red Light, Green Light, the poem and subsequent videopoem No Parking, the videopoem-play Ubu's Blues, The Voyage of the Vehicle R, as well as the use of the STOP and DANGER signs in Sympathies of War.
Again, the text is written to be performed, accompanied by slides and video. The videopoem is the last stage of the work, utilizing a segment from the video recording of the performance as an element of the videopoem.
AND ONCE THEY HAVE TASTED FREEDOM (1981) 3 MIN.
Handwritten text is superimposed over a (seemingly) still landscape.
The soundtrack is a relaxation exercise, in French. Eventually, the viewer becomes aware of an immense moving ship revealed only by its masts. As in Mummypoem, the text reveals the poem "bit by bit".
Handwritten text is superimposed over a moving ride-on mower. Each word beginning with the letter "c" is prefaced with "Quebec".
Conceived during the interminable debate over Quebec secession, this short videopoem satirizes the Quebec-ego. Surprise ending.
This video is an assembly of graffitti around Vancouver, exploring the urban psyche, comic, anarchic, at times tragic.
Both Hopscotch and Percussion were suggested by Artropolis 93, the multi-discipline art exhibition held every two years in Vancouver. The theme Art in Public Plsces prompted the creation of these works in a "commercial" format, i.e. 30 second and 60 second "spots".PERCUSSION 16 MM FILM B&W (1993) 30 SEC.
Fingers poised above the drum, the command to play is given. Percussion is a duet of voice and drum, recalling the "beatnik" era of poetry. On closer examination, the poem's recital is not "punctuated" but halted by the drum, effectively suspending the unravelling of the poem. The drum halts the poem strategically- before words beginning with the letter B. Like Hopscotch, words are substituted for numbers on the BINGO card.
HOPSCOTCH 16 MM FILM B&W (1993) 60 SEC.
In a deserted schoolyard, a young girl approaches a game of hopscotch. As we follow her skipping path through the game, we discover the squares are marked not with numbers, but words. The words spell out an aphorism for life: JUMP THROUGH HOOPS FOR LOVE MONEY POWER UNTIL -. With each close-up, her movements are depicted in slow motion, accompanied by an ominous growl. Before she starts her second pass, the sound of a ram's horn startles her. As if called away by the sound, she turns and runs away but not before she throws the stone one last time, which lands in the triangle of the "A", revealing the last word, DEATH.
Poetry has rarely succeeded in crossing from one medium to another. Translating a poem to film risks the most fundamental elements of poetry: its suggestiveness and mystery, its multi-layered descriptions, but more importantly, its intimacy.In Hopscotch the poem survives this visual metamorphosis, even gains in The process. The original poem was laid out on the page as a hopscotch game, with the words of the poem inserted in the squares. In the process of translating the poem to film, a "dramatic" tension - absent in the original - emerges. As the game is not simply "the game" of the poem, our heroine is also not simply the "player" of the film; as mirrors to the surreal, their too brief existence becomes a symbol of a timeless and inescapable truth, but still a tragedy.
Tom's Poetry
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Konyves, Videopoetry