Concrete, Visual, Videopoetry - A Model for Teaching Creative Visual Writing

8/10/2019 Concrete, Visual, Videopoetry - A Model for Teaching Creative Visual Writing

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Concrete, Visual, Videopoetry: A Model for Teaching Creative VisualWriting

By Tom Konyves

To this day, one would be hard put to find an English department that offers

courses in concrete poetry.

Marjorie Perloff, Writing as Re-Writing: Concrete Poetry as Arrire-Garde, 2007

For the past four years, I have been teaching a course called Word and Image at the University

of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, BC. The English Department lists it among its creative

writing courses; I refer to it as a creative visualwriting course. It is cross-listed with Visual Arts;

students register for either English or Visual Art credits.

I would like to begin by describing the circumstances surrounding the development of an

accommodating structure for a course in creative visual writing. (Its meant to be the kind of

preamblewe often hear before the actual reading of a poem. It appears that many poets enjoy

describing the circumstances surrounding the writing of a poem as necessary to shed light on the

significance of the poem or bring the listener into the loop of meaning.)

Four years ago I contacted Jim Andersen, then head of the English department at the University

of the Fraser Valley, about teaching a course in creative writing, specifically poetry. I introduced

myself with five books of poetry, some clippings from the Montreal Star where I wrote a regular

column on poetry, and a couple of DVDs of my videopoem1s. What triggered Jims interest was

the fact that I spent the previous two decades as a producer of videos and films. In the

professional world, Jim said, writers make their living not by poetry, or the short story, or novel

alone, but through forms that have a wider, paying audience. He suggested that since a poetry


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department; in English, a new offering was added to its Creative Writing courses, while in Visual

Arts, the students were beginning to experiment with new media, notably digital art.

Designing a course in videopoetry proved a fastidious task. One step forward, two steps back.

Forward steps are more stimulating to be sure, stepping out into the unknown what comes first,

the image, the text? But reference points were lacking; when did all this integration of poetry and

film begin? Who were the pioneers, the innovators, the theorists? Aside from my own work,

resources were not readily available.

It was also a case of legitimization; although the existence of the form was not in question, its

history had been hidden in the far corners of cinematic theory and ultimately had little relevance

to the form it had assumed by the 1990s. The challenge would also be to introduce videopoetry

to a new generation, a generation for whom multimedia was no longer a buzz word.

At first, I began researching videopoetry by accessing the only archive near at hand; Heather

Haley had been organizing and promoting an annual festival in Vancouver called Visible Verse

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since 1999 I participated in that first screening. By 2007, she had accumulated more than a

hundred of these works from which I selected 27. By the time I visited George Aguilars

collection in San Francisco3, the annual Zebra Festivals archives in Berlin4, the Pompidous

collection of avant-garde films, Videobardoscollection in Buenos Aires5, Richard Kostelanetz

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and Bob Holmans7works in New York, I had what amounted to 12 hours of resource materials.

It was easy enough to demonstrate that video poetryat least the kinetic-text branch of the genre

was a revitalization of concrete and visual poetry, which in turn were derived from the

calligrams of Guillaume Apollinaire, Stphane Mallarms Un Coup de Des, the pattern poems of

George Herbert and the 9th century archbishop Maurus encrypted poems, which in turn owed


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Following a detailed PowerPoint chronological presentation of the above, students will select a

work of their choice for their first assignment and write a thousand-word essay of

response/appreciation/analysis. Subsequent assignments require original works, text-only for the

first (a concrete or shaped poem), text and image for the second. Each submitted work is

accompanied by an artist statement which not only decodes the work for the viewer but also

delineates the creative process, including sources of inspiration and methods or constraints used

in the development of the work. Assignments are first workshopped to enable a discussion

about intention and alternative perspectives. Students are then given an opportunity to revise and

resubmit the work for grading.

Using a similar time-line approach, videopoetry is introduced with a survey of its origins:

essentially, filmpoems produced by Duchamp, Man Ray, Cocteau, Maya Deren, Anais Nin, etc.

It may surprise students to discover thatD. W. Griffiths 1909 film,Pippa Passes10,is shown as

an example of the earliest attempts at integrating poetry and film. Like many who followed his

method, Griffith borrowed the text of poems as scripts for short, narrative illustrated films.

Decades later, filmmakers will shift their focus to the materiality of film; text (voiced, displayed,

even scratched into the emulsion) remains embedded in the texture/look of the work, but it is only

with the advent of video technology that a new generation of visual poets will begin to offer text

its distinctive character collaborative yet detached establishing text as an equal and

autonomous partner of the creative process.

Students encounter definitions such as 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 elements, it produces in the viewer the realization of a poetic

experience. To differentiate it from other forms of cinema, the videopoem is a visual poem of a


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fixed duration, whose principal function 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.11

Videopoems are divided into five categories of the textual presence in a work: KINETIC TEXT,

VISUAL TEXT, SOUND TEXT, PERFORMANCE and CIN(E)POETRY.

KINETIC TEXTis essentially text animation displayed over a neutral background. These works

owe much to concrete and patterned poetry in their stylethe use of different fonts, sizes, colours

to create unusual visual representations of text. VISUAL TEXT, or words superimposed over

video/film images, presents a 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

combinedto 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. text as image.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 thefacilityof working within the traditional form of video/film,

i.e. using the narrative techniques of the mediumwithout the additional difficulty presented by

visual textto 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)POETRYis 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/video camera.

Presented with numerous examples of works in each of the five categories, students will select

one and write a thousand-word essay of response/appreciation/analysis. Before the end of the


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course, they will write their own scenario for a videopoem, addressing the integration of the three

elements:Is the text (from the soundtrack) enhanced by the imagery? How does the rhythm of

the imageryor the soundaffect the work? Does the imagery illustrate the text, or does it act

as a background against which the text is presented? How would you describe the balance

between sound and image? How does the movement of the text affect our experience? How does a

computer-generated image differ from video/film as background for text?As the final project,

groups are formed to produce one of the students pitched scenarios which are presented in the

last class of the semester. Project journals are kept, describing the process of selection, pre-

production meetings, modifications to the original script and the rolesdirector, camera operator,

editor, etc.performed by the individuals in the realization of the works.

A recurring question will be, Is text necessary in a videopoem? In contradistinction to the

poetic film which relies, almost exclusively, on the visual treatment the composition and

editing of the imagestext is the essential element or raw material of a videopoem. Indeed,

the text, whether displayed on the screen or heard on the soundtrack of a videopoem, need no

longer be an appropriation of a previously published poem. What differentiates videopoems from

poetic films today is the use of non-poetic texts to effect the experience of a poem my

interpretation of Maya Derens verticality12in which the text, when extracted and examined

as an independent element, cannot be identified as poetry. Poetry becomes the result of the

juxtaposed, blended use of text with imagery and sound13.

As the materiality of text is accorded the degree of legitimacy it requires for academic study, it is

becoming clear that both literary and visual characteristics should be addressed interdependently.

Focus is gradually shifting to the view that visual/video poetry is an experiential quality

illuminated by the interactivity of text, image and sound.


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October 5, 2010, Banff, AB

1Tom Konyves, Videopoems, Vol. 1 & 2, 1978-2010, AM Productionshttp://www.amproductions.com/videos/artsandsci.htm

2Heather Haley, Visible Versehttp://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/visible-verse-festival-2011

3San FranciscoPoetry Film Workshophttp://www.george.aguilar.com/history1.htm

4ZebraFestival, Berlin, 2008http://literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=511&L=1

5VideobardoFestival, Buenos Aires. 2008

http://www.videopoesia.com/?op=festival&lang=eng

6Richard Kostelanetz, Visual Poems, 1975-http://www.richardkostelanetz.com/invent/video.html

7Bob Holmans United States of Poetryhttp://www.worldofpoetry.org/awop_bob.htm

8Karl Kempton, VISUAL POETRY: A Brief History of Ancestral Roots and Modern Traditions, 2005

http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/wp-content/uploads/karl-kempton-visual-poetry-a-brief-introduction.pdf

9Tom Phillips,Humument, 1973

http://humument.com/

10D. W. Griffith,Pippa Passes. 1909

http://www.jstor.org/pss/25057629

11Tom Konyves, VIDEOPOETRY: A MANIFESTO, 201, p.2http://issuu.com/tomkonyves/docs/manifesto_pdf

12Willard Maas,Poetry and the Film: A Symposium, Film Culture, No. 29, 1963, pp. 56-57

http://ubu.com/papers/poetry_film_symposium.html

13Tom Konyves, VIDEOPOETRY: A MANIFESTO, 201, p.8http://issuu.com/tomkonyves/docs/manifesto_pdf
http://www.amproductions.com/videos/artsandsci.htmhttp://www.amproductions.com/videos/artsandsci.htmhttp://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/visible-verse-festival-2011http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/visible-verse-festival-2011http://www.george.aguilar.com/history1.htmhttp://www.george.aguilar.com/history1.htmhttp://literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=511&L=1http://literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=511&L=1http://www.videopoesia.com/?op=festival&lang=enghttp://www.videopoesia.com/?op=festival&lang=enghttp://www.richardkostelanetz.com/invent/video.htmlhttp://www.richardkostelanetz.com/invent/video.htmlhttp://www.worldofpoetry.org/awop_bob.htmhttp://www.worldofpoetry.org/awop_bob.htmhttp://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/wp-content/uploads/karl-kempton-visual-poetry-a-brief-introduction.pdfhttp://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/wp-content/uploads/karl-kempton-visual-poetry-a-brief-introduction.pdfhttp://humument.com/http://humument.com/http://www.jstor.org/pss/25057629http://www.jstor.org/pss/25057629http://issuu.com/tomkonyves/docs/manifesto_pdfhttp://issuu.com/tomkonyves/docs/manifesto_pdfhttp://ubu.com/papers/poetry_film_symposium.htmlhttp://ubu.com/papers/poetry_film_symposium.htmlhttp://issuu.com/tomkonyves/docs/manifesto_pdfhttp://issuu.com/tomkonyves/docs/manifesto_pdfhttp://issuu.com/tomkonyves/docs/manifesto_pdfhttp://ubu.com/papers/poetry_film_symposium.htmlhttp://issuu.com/tomkonyves/docs/manifesto_pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/pss/25057629http://humument.com/http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/wp-content/uploads/karl-kempton-visual-poetry-a-brief-introduction.pdfhttp://www.worldofpoetry.org/awop_bob.htmhttp://www.richardkostelanetz.com/invent/video.htmlhttp://www.videopoesia.com/?op=festival&lang=enghttp://literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=511&L=1http://www.george.aguilar.com/history1.htmhttp://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/visible-verse-festival-2011http://www.amproductions.com/videos/artsandsci.htm

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Concrete, Visual, Videopoetry - A Model for Teaching Creative Visual Writing