In the course of ordering the new book The Tender Between by noted modern haiku poet Eve Luckring, I looked up her website and discovered to my pleasure that she’s also a multimedia artist who has experimented with videopoetry to great effect. So I’m featuring this 12-part series as my sole post to the main site this week, in the hopes that vistors will find the time to watch it. For those with limited time, however, Luckring has also uploaded an excerpt:

The Vimeo description reads:

The Junicho Video-Renku Book is a series of 12 “twelve-tone” video-poems (1:45-3 minutes each) based on a form of 17th century Japanese poetry called renku.

The experience of watching a video-renku is phantasmagoric. From a centipede trapped in a sink to a man singing karaoke to his pet love-birds, The Junicho Video-Renku Book creates a richly layered collage of moving image, sound, and text that journeys through the everyday. Similar to an exquisite corpse, renku is composed as a counter-narrative according to a complex set of rules based on the structural devices of “link and shift”. In addition to many other parameters, the verses of a renku must travel through all four seasons, comment on love, and address both the moon and blossom.

Luckring’s website adds:

The Junicho Video-Renku Book premiered at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and has since been presented at &NOW 2015: Blast Radius, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, The Wroclaw Media Art Biennale, 2015, Poland and Whitespace, 2017, Atlanta, GA.