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Frogpond 38.1 • 2015

Museum of Haiku
Literature Award

Haiku & Senryu

Essay - Beautiful Dance

Haibun

Haiku Sequence

Renku

Book Reviews

From the Editors

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Beautiful Dance: A Conversation with Eve Luckring About Video Art and Haiku

by Michele Root-Bernstein, East Lansing, Michigan

Beautiful Dance: A Conversation with Eve Luckring
About Video Art and Haiku

(complete PDF version)

Here is a sample excerpt from the opening page of this interview:

I first “met” Eve Luckring in the pages of A New Resonance 6, where her haiku were presented as “thumbnail sketches for short stories,” alive with introspection and self-discovery.[1] Bumping into her again, in the pages of haiku journals, in an online kukai, I found myself relearning her lineaments, for her poetry, it seemed to me, headed rapidly for the frontiers of haiku territory. Because Eve is also an artist at work in video, sound, photography and installation, the trajectory intrigued but did not surprise me. Polymaths, individuals with strong interest and activity in more than one field of endeavor, dominate the annals of creative achievement. Challenged and compelled by her art, I jumped at the chance to get to know her in person. This is an edited, compressed version of our face-to-face conversation in Los Angeles, June 18, 2014.

Michele: Eve, what fascinates me about your work, both in video and haiku, is the fusion of visual and verbal arts. Which is the chicken and which the egg?

Eve: Both? I can’t make neat categories. Depending on what I’m attending to, different ways of thinking kick in. With writing poetry there’s a very visual thing that happens. If I’m in the words, I’m seeing. And then with the visual work, it’s a language to me. There’s a syntax I’m always working with. So the visual and the verbal are very fused; I don’t know really how to break them apart.

M: Some of your haiku that I consider my favorites would attest to that, for instance

A country road. A tree.

for lack of a bit of
crow

Tell me, have you always been interested in language and visual art, both?

E: Yes. But the first formal training I had in anything was music lessons, like a lot of middle-class kids. And they were very, very impactful for me. I’m as attuned to sound fabrics as much as anything. Sound is key for me. It’s almost like the bridge between the visual and verbal.

[essay continues for several more pages] . . .

. . .

Root-Bernstein, Michele. "Beautiful Dance: A Conversation with Eve Luckring About Video Art and Haiku." Frogpond 38.1, Winter, 2015.

This excerpt inclues the first page of the interview: page 86. The complete essay includes pages 86-98. To read the complete essay, click on the link to the PDF version:

Beautiful Dance: A Conversation with Eve Luckring
About Video Art and Haiku
by Michele Root-Bernstein

(complete PDF version)

3dots

Eve Luckring works primarily in video, photography, poetry, and installation. Her work questions the assumptions—and experiments with the boundaries—that define place, body, and habit. Currently, she has been translating traditional Japanese poetic forms into the visual realm to renegotiate the binaries of nature/culture, subject/object, and self/world. Luckring’s videos and installations have been exhibited internationally in both traditional art venues and public spaces. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies.

Michele Root-Bernstein has one foot in the humanities and social sciences, another in the arts. Co-author of "Sparks of Genius, The 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People" with her husband and colleague, Robert, she studies creative imagination across the life cycle. She also writes haiku, appearing in a number of North American journals, A New Resonance 6, and Haiku 2014. Currently, she serves as associate editor of Frogpond.