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 cinma pur). Instead, an entirely new form of poetic experience can be produced; this new experience, altogether an aesthetic experience, depends on the artists intuitive skill in recognizing the collaborative potential of the three elements as well as the audiences 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 Gomringers Wind and Silencio David (Jhave) Johnston Wind (2010) Lenora de Barros Silencio (2006) Two German films. For the voiced text of Gerhard Ruhms 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. 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 Blakes 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