ONE HUNDRED DAYS!

Cutting out words for stunt poetry

My blog statistics tell me that today's post will be the 31st. According to my maths (which is not too reliable) that means I've been blogging for a month! I'm pleased about that. And I'm so grateful to all of you out there who take your time to read my blog. You probably have different reasons for wanting to read about the Escapades of a Norwegian Big Mama, but I love you all for it, whatever your reasons!

Yesterday's blog post was supposed to be about my cut-out poems, or stunt poetry as I quickly named it, which took place over a period of one hundred days from the 5th September to the 13th December 2012. But in order to explain it, I wanted to introduce you to my friend Grete - who was the engineer behind it all - and that's the reason she was the topic of yesterday's post. (I would have written about her sooner or later anyway, and she's going to crop up frequently in here, being such an important part of my life).

After I'd more or less exhausted the magnetic food poetry that I wrote about in two earlier posts, Grete came up with this brilliant challenge: She gave me a book called "A Thousand Days In Venice" by Marlena di Blasi.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/87473.A_Thousand_Days_in_Venice 

She said: "You are going to do this page by page - cut out words - like the words of your food poetry - and compose a poem from these words every day for one hundred days. Mix the words any which way, but never use words from other pages." 

So this became my routine - usually over a cup of coffee or tea in the morning, before I started my day. I published every poem on Facebook, and to begin with my Facebook friends were a bit bewildered as to what this was all about. If they hadn't read my explanation, that is. But a hundred days is actually quite a long time! As I received daily encouragement from Grete, in the way of comments on FB, phone calls, text messages and of course long conversations while out walking, more and more of my readers gave me feedback on my stunt poetry! 

It was fun! It was exciting! I was beginning to look forward to those short time-outs every day when I was stunt-composing! And not one day did I skip it. 

I had to get some frame around it, a structure. So I decided first of all that I would try to limit the time I spent on it, and that, after all, lies in the nature of something called "stunt". Only ONCE during those hundred days did I get stuck. I went about that day's poem as usual - photocopied the relevant page, looked over the page quickly, started cutting out words. Then, when combining the words - nothing worked! The only way to escape that "writer's block" was to rewind, restart. That did the trick.

Oh, I loved my stunting! My family all shook their heads at me at first, but soon got used to it. In fact they're used to a Wild Big Mama, after years of living with her. They're also used to that Other Wild Big Mama Friend, after knowing her for as many years. When I spent a pre-Christmas weekend in the mountains with good friends, they too didn't even react when I got out the scissors. 

More cut-outs tomorrow. 

This post ends with some fantastic pictures of those lovely granddaughters of mine. Photographed by Grete, two years ago. I do miss my babies now. That's the bonus of alone-time.