Tom Konyves
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
Address to E-Poetry Festival, London, UK 2013
2013
visibility
…
description
3 pages
link
1 file
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
June 18, 2013 "Innovative Poetry in the Age of the Image: Where is the Avant-Garde in Videopoetry?"
Related papers
Videopoetry and Its Metaphors
Address written for the Symposium "New Art Emerging: Two or Three Things One Should Know About Videopoetry", held Nov. 5, 2022, concurrent with the exhibition "Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2020" which ran from Sept 17-Dec 11, 2022, at the Surrey Art Gallery. 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
MEANING AND AESTHETIC EXPERIMENTATIONS IN SELECTED VIDEO POEMS BY WAYNE VISSER
ABSTRACT Digital poems are digitally generated poems that can only be experienced within the digital environment. While there is an avalanche of critical articles on poetry, the focus has been on the poems of the paper culture and there is a dearth of scholarly attention on digital poetry. This study therefore attempts an analysis of selected ten video poems with a view to interrogating the influence of the digital environment on meaning creation. This study is carried out with theoretical tools of Multimodality. Multimodal approach to the study of digital literature derives from the works of critical thinkers including Gunther Kress and Van Leeuwen. The relevance of Multimodality to the analysis of digital poetry is hinged on the fact that linguistic element alone has become insufficient vehicle for meaning-making where other modes are involved. Hence, Multimodal interaction and its implication on meaning creation are essential considerations for the analysis of digital poetry. The ten selected poems are authored by South African poet, Wayne Visser. The choice of Visser’s poems is informed by the fact that he is a prolific poet of both the paper and the digital culture. The selected video poems are analysed to underscore how pictures, music and recital can enhance as well as downplay the meaning of the poem. Pictures can serve as visual metaphors for the ideas in the text; pictures can advance authorial intent beyond the domain of the text; the background music can connect the reader emotionally and psychologically to the message of the poem; from the recital, the reader/listener/viewer can learn the pronunciation of the local colours in the poem; the aesthetics can sometimes shadow the figurativeness of the idea of the poem; some ideas projected in poems are concepts that are best coded in words and cannot be pictorially represented as blending them with images can impede the reader/viewer/listener’s imagination; pictures can sometimes supply a contrasting meaning; pictorial representations sometimes streamline the range of available interpretations; aesthetics if not properly harnessed can serve as a distraction; the voice of the poet can also constitute a disturbance if the reciting-pace is faster or slower than the reader/viewer/listener can cope with. Aesthetics, as it relates to video poetry, can enhance as well as downplay the meaning of the text. Hence, it is expedient that the video poet be conscious of the two sides of the relationship between aesthetics and meaning creation in order to ensure that meaning is not sacrificed on the altar of technology. It is therefore recommended that scholars, researchers and instructors begin to throw their weight around video/digital poetry by making literature students take a compulsory course in “Literature and the New Media” and extending such trainings to intending video poets to empower them in the art of blending various semiotic resources in a way that authorial intent is facilitated. It is also recommended that more researches be conducted on digital poetry/video poetry and the findings of such researches be made available to the consumers and producers of this type of literature. KEYWORDS: Digital poetry, Video poetry, Multimodality, Pictures, Recital. WORD COUNT: 500
CROSSROADS POETICS: TEXT IMAGE MUSIC FILM & BEYOND
This collection of essays on twentieth-century poetry and poetics is written from a wide-ranging perspective, working analytically and comparatively with literature, music, video, film, architecture and performance art. Bringing together readings of Virgil Thomson, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, Louis Feuillade, Rosmarie Waldrop, Frank Zappa, Bill Viola and Pierre Alechinsky, this book attempts to delineate the possibility of a truly transversal poetics, one which creates a space for a reconsideration of contemporary poetics while navigating the complex interactions between the theory and practice.
Film as Poetry
Over the last few years several essays have been published which include a comparison of Deren’s concept of vertical and horizontal film form with Deleuze’s theory of movement-image and time-image; for example, Annette Michelson’s and Renata Jackson’s essays in Maya Deren and The American Avant-garde (2001) and Erin Brannigan’s discussion of Deren’s work in Dancefilm (2011). Given the tentative nature of their comparison this essay will undertake a more systematic review of the relation between film and language which underpins Deren’s and Deleuze’s terminologies and further investigate both similarities and differences between them. The intention is to further clarify Deren’s legacy within experimental film and interdisciplinary discourses.
Re-defining poetry through motion
Interfaces - Image, Text, Language, 2023
Book review on Sarah Tremlett's "The Poetics of Poetry Film: Film Poetry, Videopoetry, Lyric Voice, Reflection" (Intellect, 2021).
Poetry and Media (2006)
The ideas of Siegfried J. Schmidt (Münster) helped me to understand the relationship between a concept of media (as developed by Schmidt) and history of poetry as a medial artifact.
All Together Now: The Multimedia Avant-garde (MSA 17 2015)
Seminar Co-Chair
Lyric Poetry in Pixel: Toward a Postcolonial and Postmodern Poetics of Digital Texts
This paper concerns itself with the merits of poetics in an age where mass media and digital technology reign–specifically, how poetics informs the very theory of the medium of digitally-produced art, and how the poetic medium is constantly evolving and must then find new vehicles of expression in developing forms. It will be this paper’s position that the music video possesses the truest possibility of the marriage of literature and film practice: the language of the poem-turned-song, rendered in key elements of film, will afford a “new” lyricism consonant with postmodern thought. Three texts chosen here for analysis are in fact poetic interpretations, and which seem to make establishing the relationship between poetry and digital film more conspicuous: "End to the Full Moon," "Fragments of the Moon," and "Soft Night." The first was released as a music video (launched through the MTV™ channel) in 2004 to promote Palanca Award-Winning Poet Nerisa del Carmen Guevara's first anthology, Reaching Destination: Poems and the Search for Home, with an accompanying audio CD of songs interpreted from her poetry by some musical artists. The second is also a music video, as declared by the poet Nadia Camit-Upton; she had a collection of poetry released in 2004 by Powerbooks, with a VCD of the videos her friends made of 20 of her poems. Meanwhile, "Soft Night," taking from the title of Abelardo Subido's poem, was meant to be a trailer for filmmaker Khavn dela Cruz's digital feature, The Longest Moment You're Not Here, but it could be considered a stand-alone work and was in fact shown as an experimental short in a Singapore Asian Film Festival. The selection of these texts does not in any way imply that they are meant to depend on their poetic roots to determine their “literariness.” In the analysis of these texts, this paper hopes to posit new considerations of reading “poetically,” looking to other media to cite what could be considered poems or not, first, by enumerating the formalistic equivalences between poetic language and digital language, then arguing that lyricism will eventually take place in the viewer's journey and engagement with the text. As what Christian Metz intones, film lets denotation happen in the reader; it is in him that the processes of interpretation and reading must take place (Metz 1992, 169). This exercise in determining the place of poetry in the digital age accounts for more than the transformative and transitional space of literature in the age of media and digital art; the very form itself seeks to be the embodiment of a counter-consciousness in a non-literary age, for in its transformation of the poetic form it self-referentially proves some of the problems that poetry, printed or recited or performed, undergoes. John Ashberry in his discussion of the avant-garde said it best: “Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful.” In looking at new spaces for poetry, allow the experimental spirit not to tense, but to excite. ***This is an excerpt of a longer paper published in "KRITIK/CRITIQUE: Essays from The J. Elizalde Navarro National Workshop in the Criticism of the Arts and Humanities, 2009-2012" (UST Publishing House, 2014, pp. 6-25).
Address to e-poetry June 18, 2013, Kingston University, London, UK
"Innovative Poetry in the Age of the Image: Where is the Avant-Garde in Videopoetry?"
In the past decade, I have witnessed a veritable explosion in the creation and dissemination of short videos purporting to be “poetry”. An ever-widening support structure of festivals (Zebra in Berlin, Videobardo in Buenos Aires, Visible Verse in Vancouver, Saddho in New Delhi, Instants Video in Marseille), conferences (MIX in Bath, UK, WORD/IMAGE/IMAGE/WORD in New York), specialty “channels” on YouTube, Vimeo, movingpoems.com and other web-based video archives have transformed what was essentially an experimental genre of visual poetry into a welcoming medium for personal expression; in other words, it has become popular.
With the increase in popularity, it has presented itself as an “open form” for traditional verse, often illustrative of its texts, even accompanied by soundtracks drawn from current pop music charts. Considering the computer-assisted advancements in image and sound manipulation, how has poetry fared in the leap from page to screen?
For some time now, I have been promulgating a possible change in the nature of poetry when it is expressed in the form of a short video; my view is that “poetry” is the result of the judicious, poetic juxtaposition of text, image and sound; the poetry in a videopoem thus ceases to be simply the text element in what I perceive as a true or pure videopoem (pure in the sense of cinéma pur). Instead, an entirely new form of poetic experience can be produced; this new experience, altogether an aesthetic experience, depends on the artist’s intuitive skill in recognizing the collaborative potential of the three elements as well as the audience’s skill of recognition that the convergence of these three expressive media can, in fact, result in more than a narrative told in visual terms. Assisted by selected works, the following presentation will explore the genre of videopoetry as it attempts to evolve into the art form of a future generation of poets – poets who are also filmmakers.
***
On Sept. 6, 2011, I went out on a limb and drew a line in the sand. I published an essay on videopoetry that I called a manifesto. I went out on a limb because I was not satisfied with how this encounter of the verbal and the visual, this interdisciplinary practice of integrating text, image and sound to produce a new genre of poetry, was being described; essentially, that film or video was becoming another platform for publishing written poetry. The proof is in the hundreds of so-called videopoems that, for the past ten years at least, have been arriving with regularity at the major poetry film festivals as well as by the thousands on the web. (Depending on how you spell it, Google lists 29000 or 290000 results for videos tagged with the term “videopoem”.) The vast majority of exhibited works at these festivals are voiced, prioritizing the words of the text, usually as pre-existing, published poems. The question is, will we always associate the words we hear with those specific images? Of course, one person's blur is another's soft gaze.
In 1927, speaking for what is called French Impressionist Cinema, the avant-garde filmmakers who described the purest form of film as a film poem, Germaine Dulac questioned the relationship, by stating that "If cinema is merely… an animated reflection of literature… it is not an art. The new aesthetic is to divest cinema of all elements not particular to it, to seek its true essence in movement and visual rhythms.” Its true essence was in fact medium specificity. Thus, text, whether as intertitles, superimposed or voiced – except when scratched into the emulsion – disappeared from experimental, pure film.
What is specific to a hybrid form like videopoetry is not what is specific to its elements. One has to trust that a poetic experience will emerge from the juxtaposition of its elements. Text, image and sound tend to arrive complete-in-themselves, self-sufficient, if you will. For the hybrid form, the specificity, I would suggest, is in the collaborative properties (a more accurate term may be synergistic properties) of the individual elements. In other words, not all texts (a good example would be most previously published poems), not all images (obviously) or soundtracks embody collaborative or synergistic potential.
This collaborative property, I would suggest, implies an incompleteness, the presence of accommodating spaces in each of the elements. Once the accommodating spaces appear in the succession of images, they can be completed by the text and the soundtrack.
Videopoetry could also be seen as the Duchampian “assisted readymade”. Consider the recorded image as the readymade; the function of the videopoet is to discover whether there exists something significant, yet still incomplete, a collaborative property beneath the surface of the present moment.
I would now like to present 12 30-second excerpts of videopoems I have found particularly interesting.
Beginning with a tribute to concrete poetry, here are two videopoem interpretations of Eugene Gomringer’s “Wind” and “Silencio”
David (Jhave) Johnston – “Wind” (2010)
Lenora de Barros – “Silencio” (2006)
Two German films.
For the voiced text of Gerhard Ruhm’s poem, “Unequal Brothers” (2007), Hubert Sielecki discovered a collaborative property in the manipulation of approaching and receding ocean waves.
In 2002, Ralf Schmerberg produced “Poem”, the first feature film to present a series of 19 unrelated poems on the mainstream cinema circuit. Of the 19 films, 3 exhibit unusual juxtapositions of image and text. One of these proposes a postmodern treatment of a love poem.
Heiner Muller – “I Cannot Give You The World” (2003)
The next excerpts present 3 videopoets’ interpretation of beauty as the chance encounter of a readymade image and visual text - on an editing table.
Tom Konyves – “Quebecause” (1982)
Harlene Weijs – “Ode to Dad” (2002)
Sarah Tremlett – “Some Everybodies” (2009)
In the next 3 excerpts, the artists explore the premise that a poem can emerge from appropriating, manipulating and ultimately recontextualizing archival film footage.
W. Mark Sutherland – “In Memory of Jack Donovan Foley” (2008)
Natalia Fedorova/Machine Libertine – “Snow Queen” (2010) based on the 1957 film and William Blake’s The Poison Tree, and
Brandon Downing – homophonic translation of the song “Zindagi Ke Sefer Mein” (2009) juxtaposed with the 1979 film “Magic”.
In his Manifesto for Concrete Poetry, Oyvind Fahlstrom wrote "Always the precious repetition for the joy of recognition."
To conclude, here are 2 examples of video works which appropriate TV content, followed by deconstructing and reconstructing words, even parts of words, to transform sound bites into sound poems.
eddie d – “Poem no 7” (1998)
Matt Mullins – “Our Bodies” (2013)
- Tom Konyves June 18, 2013