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