He graduated from Concordia University in 1969, worked as a teacher, editor and journalist until 1977, when he became a poet-member of Vehicule Art Gallery, Montreal's first artist-run non-profit centre.
[4] Between 1977 and 1983, Konyves produced his first videopoems – Sympathies of War,[5][6][7] Mummypoem, Yellow Light Blues, No Parking, And Once They Have Tasted Freedom, Not Before Nor After (with Linda Lee Tracy), Quebecause and Thus Spoke Tzarathustra.
He published 2 issues of a poetry magazine, Hh[11] (invented acronym for the word "hobbyhorse", considered the dictionary definition of Dada), that included some visual poems and text collages.
Following a protest[16] by the poets, led by Louis Dudek, the commission relented and agreed to post 30% of the English poems, reflecting the Anglo population of Montreal.
[25][26] Having moved from 61 to 307 St. Catherine Street, Vehicule Art presented its first Exhibition of Concrete Poetry,[27][28] curated by Tom Konyves in June, 1980.
In 2008, to develop a course in visual poetry at the University of the Fraser Valley, Konyves began researching videopoetry by visiting archives in Vancouver, San Francisco, Berlin, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Toronto, New York and Chicago.
[35] In the manifesto, he claimed it was necessitated by "the underlying dichotomy (that) opposes videopoetry – I envision the measured integration of narrative, non-narrative and anti-narrative juxtapositions of text, image and sound as resulting in a poetic experience – to works which publish poems (voiced or displayed on-screen) in video format."
Videopoetry is defined as "a genre of poetry displayed on a screen, distinguished by its time-based, poetic juxtaposition of images with text and sound.
From 1983 to 2003, the company produced numerous educational, industrial, corporate and music videos, including To Return: The John Walkus Story,[37] the award-winning documentary[38] on belonging, acceptance and loss of culture.
This powerful one-hour documentary witnesses and celebrates young Kwakwaka'wakw artist John Walkus Green's journey home to the village he was forcefully adopted out of as a child.
Stephen Hume of the Vancouver Sun described the film as “one of the most disturbing, illuminating and deeply troubling documentaries I’ve seen in years.”[39] In 2003, a fire destroyed the AM space and production ceased.
- MICHAEL MIROLLA, The Montreal Gazette, Dec. 24, 1982 Tom Konyves acknowledges both the surrealists and the dadaists as major influences on his performance poetry.
The introductions serve to document the extraordinarily energetic literary activity in Montreal over the past decade, and specifically Konyves' movement towards video poetry.
- ANN MANDEL, Books In Review, Canadian Literature, Issue 101, summer 1984 (p. 149-153) most As his title suggests, in Ex Perimeter, Tom Konyves explores boundaries — between poetry and prose, and between art and life.
The economy of language here, the proselike cadence, the focus on the "real" world, and on human mortality, are all features of Konyves' writing in this volume.
Konyves relays an authentic voice in well-carpentered passages... short, from the heart epiphanies one finds marked with peculiarly urban tenderness; back alley kind of poems that cue on the localized imagery of a Montreal lane, a cemetery, a lover's bed.
- TREVOR CAROLAN, The Vancouver Sun, May 13, 1989 The poems in Ex Perimeter are sparse, clear, direct and full of delicate and precise insight.
In short, these final fifty pages come close fulfilling Konyves’ own declared desire to create “a temporary object / through which a thought flows / searching for a vantage point / to view the human soul.”