OOSOOM

Montreal, 1977. What was happening in conceptual art, performance art, multi-media experiments and poetry collaborations was happening around the artist-run Vehicule Art Gallery in Montreal, and Tom Konyves was busy creating a poetry machine. As one of the seven Vehicule Poets, he put poetry on the buses (Poesie En Mouvement), wrote a monthly column for The Montreal Star (Poetry Corn-er), initiated a collaborative poem and its performance (Drummer Boy Raga: Red Light Green Light), and produced a series of 26 TV programs about the avant-garde of Montreal (Art Montreal); he also produced his first videopoems, a term he coined to describe his blending of poetry and video into an “inextricable union”. Meanwhile, the voice of his first book of poems (No Parking) blended its way into a parodic narrative, a veritable surrealist novella he called OOSOOM (pronounced as the letters not the word). We find characters like Audrey, Hans-Hans, Wilfredo (and his winking dog), Eugene (and the Martian) prepping for the eve of a new performance art work, as they move through fragments of landscapes on limbs of near-clichés, providing the odd thread to a carefully sustained hallucination.