As the title suggests, videopoetry could be considered a combination of video art and poetry. However, for Surrey-based poet-critic and guest curator Tom Konyves, videopoetry is much more than this. His essay “Videopoetry: A Manifesto” (2011) has helped define the genre internationally.

Konyves describes videopoetry as the “rendering of poetry as an object to be experienced through the medium of video.” To succeed as a legitimate artform, the imagery in a videopoem—including on-screen text—does not illustrate the voiced text. Rather, videopoetry (as opposed to documentation of a poetry reading) distinguishes itself by poetic juxtapositions of images with text and sound. In the measured blending of these three elements, it produces in the viewer, Konyves argues, “the realization of a poetic experience.” It is an artform that perfectly reflects our image- and text-saturated culture.

Poets with a Video Camera presents the largest retrospective of videopoetry in Canada to date. The exhibition features over twenty-five works by some of the world’s leading practitioners. It is organized around five categories of videopoetry: kinetic text, visual text, sound text, performance, cin(e)poetry.