Poetry in Performance

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Tom Konyves is a multi-media poet. Poetry in Performance is a compilation, in book form, of his videopoems, live performances (black electrician’s tape on a white wall, “In a Station of the Metro” performed in a station of the Montreal metro), and visual poems. In fairness to Konyves I ought to say that perhaps his work suffers in the translation to the printed page from the other media, but I doubt it. The poems are mediocre, amateurish, intellectually impoverished, and essentially witless. His prefaces to the various sections of the book are meagre attempts at giving them artistic respectability by explaining motives. Konyves is not a true experimenter, for a true experimenter is also an inventor. He is boldly copying the defiant artists of a half century ago.