Malin K

«Deconstruction poetry» is a technique to read among the lines. Some call it «Black out poetry».

I search through someone’s text, looking for text fragments I like. Then I put them together to become something different from what originally was there. I can use the new sentences either as a visual expression as they are, or use the fragments to form other texts. I find the words in newspaper articles, novels, essays and other literary forms that contain exciting words. Often, the result has absolutely no relation to the original. Sometimes you have to use some imagination to grasp what the words may mean when they are used in unknown contexts – and tolerate that grammar is not always 100% correct. Translations from one language to another may become quite strange, because the nuances found in one language is difficult to express in another without reinterpretation. Or, I almost always think it sounds much better in the original language, no matter what language it is.

I use this technique mainly to generate material for other projects. Sometimes they become nice on their own as blunt statements, but I prefer developing the texts further. For instance, the deconstructed book «Return to the future» by Sigrid Undset eventually turned into the libretto «Black days» for the composer Hartmut Schulz. It has also been the basis for many other texts, poems and monologues.

I wrote a libretto inspired by «Ghosts» by Henrik Ibsen for an opera by the composer Torstein Aagaard-Nilsen, premiere 23. February 2024 on the main stage in Meininger Staatstheater. For this project, I have deconstructed the play, and some text fragments from the original play and also from the Nemesis video (from the Ibsen quotes on Karl Johans street in Oslo) have worked their way into the final libretto.