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

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 visual writing 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
preamble we 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

course was not immediately available, I could quote unquote get my foot in the door by
developing a course in screenwriting, a subject not being offered at UFV. I did get my foot in the
door, but what I really wanted to teach was videopoetry.

What moves a poet to create a work in a time-based visual medium? In my case, peer stimulation
was definitely the motivating factor. Before I became a member of Montreals first artist-run
centre, Vehicule Art Gallery, I was not aware that there was such a form of poetry as
experimental. By 1978, when I produced my first videopoem, I was creating visual poems for Hh,
my self-published Dada poetry magazine, organized Montreals first concrete poetry exhibition,
posted 20 poems (10 English, 10 French) on a thousand of the citys buses, performed Ezra
Pounds In a Station of the Metro in a station of the metro. Suddenly, there were seven of us
the Vehicule Poets. The atmosphere at Vehicule was intense, electric. Week by week, I was
witnessing the development of what seemed like a new language: in painting, in installation and
performance art, in graphic, multi-media and video art; it was almost expected for a poet to
experiment with video. I no longer saw poetry as limited to the printed page. Still, it felt like I
was working in a vacuum; the videos I was creating were something other than video art. They
began as a disaffected poets reaction to what I observed as the lack of interest poets had for the
language of new media performance and video.

Of course, it was a form virtually unheard of, but Jim was intrigued, recommending that I meet
with Jacqueline Nolte, head of the Visual Arts Department, who to my amazement encouraged
me to develop the course she immediately dubbed Word and Image. It was expected that for
the requirements of Visual Arts it would be a studio course, that is, hands-on writing, shooting,
editing, and producing videopoems; the English Department preferred to have students more
engaged in creating texts. This was not problematic; there was nothing contentious for either

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 Verse2
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, Videobardos collection in Buenos Aires5, Richard Kostelanetz6
and Bob Holmans7 works in New York, I had what amounted to 12 hours of resource materials.

It was easy enough to demonstrate that video poetry at 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

their expression to the carmina figurata of a few centuries earlier. (Evidently the juxtaposition of
poetic and visual configurations provided the desired motivation to meditate on spiritual matters.)
Moving eyes and moving pictures; two aspects of looking at poems in addition to reading or
listening to them.

The ideal survey would follow Karl Kemptons suggestion to present the various avant-garde
movements from the Twentieth and early Twenty First centuries to the present moment and the
contributions of their various talented composers of modern and contemporary visual poetry.
Though incomplete, here is a list of topics and movements that should be included: Fauvism,
Cubism, Collage, Italian Futurism, Russian Futurism, Imagism, Orphism, Vorticism,
Constructivism, Dada, De Stijl, Surrealism, Bauhaus, various Japanese avant-garde movements of
the

1920s,

Lettrism,

Kinetic,

Concrete

Poetry,

Fluxus,

Pop,

Op,

Visual

Poetry,

Correspondence/Mail Art, Russian Transfurism, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Book Art.8

In class, we cover many of his topics, including collaborative poems and images (exquisite
corpses), Tom Phillips altered

text masterpiece, A Humument9, Lawrence Weiners black

stenciled statements on bare gallery walls and Martin Firrells large-scale digital projections onto
St. Pauls Cathedral and Britains Houses of Parliament (to name a few). The milestones still
remain as Mallarm, Apollinaire and Gomringer but it is important to include Canadians such as
bp nichol, bill bissett, Judith Copithorne, Steve McCaffery, Lionel Kearns, Jim Andrews, Gary
Barwin, JW Curry and David UU, who have also made significant contributions to the genre.

The course then becomes structured in two halves: Concrete and Visual Poetry (for the page) and
Videopoetry (for the screen).

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 that D. 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

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 TEXT is essentially text animation displayed over a neutral background. These works
owe much to concrete and patterned poetry in their style the 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
combined to 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 the facility of working within the traditional form of video/film,
i.e. using the narrative techniques of the medium without the additional difficulty presented by
visual text to 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)POETRY is 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

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 imagery or the sound affect 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, preproduction meetings, modifications to the original script and the roles director, 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 images text 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 verticality12 in 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.

 October 5, 2010, Banff, AB

Tom Konyves, Videopoems, Vol. 1 & 2, 1978-2010, AM Productions

http://www.amproductions.com/videos/artsandsci.htm
2

Heather Haley, Visible Verse

http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca/visible-verse-festival-2011
3

San Francisco Poetry Film Workshop

http://www.george.aguilar.com/history1.htm
4

Zebra Festival, Berlin, 2008

http://literaturwerkstatt.org/index.php?id=511&L=1
5

Videobardo Festival, Buenos Aires. 2008

http://www.videopoesia.com/?op=festival&lang=eng
6

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

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

Karl 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
9

Tom Phillips, Humument, 1973

http://humument.com/
10

D. W. Griffith, Pippa Passes. 1909

http://www.jstor.org/pss/25057629
11

Tom Konyves, VIDEOPOETRY: A MANIFESTO, 201, p.2

http://issuu.com/tomkonyves/docs/manifesto_pdf
12

Willard Maas, Poetry and the Film: A Symposium, Film Culture, No. 29, 1963, pp. 56-57
http://ubu.com/papers/poetry_film_symposium.html
13

Tom Konyves, VIDEOPOETRY: A MANIFESTO, 201, p.8

http://issuu.com/tomkonyves/docs/manifesto_pdf