POEM FOR THE RIVERS PROJECT (2004) 2 min. Tom Konyves, Alex Konyves

What begins as “fatherly advice” turns into a vision of the river Styx, where Time stands and beckons – yet the poet sees only the vitality of his son and the mystery of poetry, revealed through the mundane “bridge” of his words.

Poem for the Rivers Project.wmv

During the summer of 2003, my 18-year-old son Alexander was working for a multimedia project of the exhibition The River through Artists’ Eyes at the Surrey Art Gallery – when he kept pestering me to submit a poem. I wrote a 13-line poem which we posited, one line (sometimes one word) at a time, over Alexander’s abstract water-related images, all sustained by the drone of an unrelenting Didjeridu. The poetic narrative is finally resolved by superimposing a slow-release verbo-visual pun on a spectacular moving shot of the underside of the Alex Fraser Bridge.
- Tom Konyves