Metamorfoosi.net – ‘a week’s photo’
Leena Kaunonen
e-mail: mail[at]metamorfoosi.net
Metamorfoosi.net is a website for my word & text project, which started in 2005, very innocently, just by adding short descriptive texts next to my photos. Once a week, a new photo accompanied with a text appeared on my website. Since then my project has undergone some modifications and become more literally oriented. At present, it is a kind of ongoing meditation, a long poem, which is being completed with a poetic text & image every week. My texts can be called meditations, poems or mini-essays. I also write poems which are inspired by photographs, and they correspond in mood and tone to the atmosphere of the photos. The photo and text -relationship can be formed in another way, too. That is, I have been contemplating something for a while, and eventually I decide to write about it. When the text is completed, what I need is a picture to illustrate it. For me, the exciting thing is to realize that a photograph is never just an illustration to the text, it gives an extra meaning to the text, telling something that the text alone cannot tell, and vice versa. I hope to continue with this project as long as I can.
Though metamorfoosi.net is not a personal diary, I have always been interested in combining life and poetry in a way or another, and this project seems to suit me perfectly, because my writing and taking pictures follow the course of my life, its rhythms, suddenly changing moods, and changing seasons. Looking at my old entries retrospectively makes me aware of how my writing has gradually metamorphosed me. Despite all these changes, variations, and fluctuations, the routine of making an entry every week will persist. Of course, writing is not just a “routine” – it’s a very positive word! Suppose you take the task of writing seriously enough, it becomes an integral part of your life, as natural as breathing, eating or sleeping, and you simply can’t do without it. It is also something I try do in order to make sense of things, and life. Hopefully readers of metamorfoosi.net can find something interesting here and perhaps share some of these thoughts with me. At some point I got feedback from my friends and colleagues from abroad, saying they would like to read my texts, too. So I decided to write the texts in both languages, Finnish and English. Those who can read both languages will discover that I seldom write literal translations from one language to another.
Because I’m academic by profession, writing of poems fascinates me even more. Not because I need to relax and write something “nice” instead of academic papers and books, but because fundamentally, no matter which text genre I choose, the creative writing prosess is always the same, and yet, it is not. Some of the possible outcomes of this project will be that I can perhaps understand better the nature of writing. It is conscious and goal-oriented, but only partly so. With poems, it is a question of a different discourse, one that is not bound to “reality” we believe in our every day life. My poems are about dreams and memories, fragments of personal and collective history. In my writing, the big idea is the peaceful coexistence of different discourses; one of them is rational, conscious and guided by logic and the other is a tacit, largely unconscious process, a kind of embodiment of emotions in the poems and essays.
In addition, my website contains some travelogs (in Finnish) and information, both in Finnish and English, on my publications: studies on literature, scholarly articles, interviews, book reviews and articles in literary journals.
Metamorfoosi.net on sivusto, joka kertoo epäsuorasti minusta kuvien runojen, pienoisesseiden ja proosarunojen muodossa. Sivuilla olevat kuvat ja tekstit ovat eräänlainen meditaatio, vuosien pituiseksi venyvä runoelma, joka muuttuu tekijänsä mukana. Siksi niiden yhtenä innoittajana on antiikista periytyvä kirjallinen klassikko, Ovidiuksen Metamorfoosit. Projekti on käynnistynyt vuonna 2005. Aion jatkaa sitä niin monta vuotta kuin pystyn, toivottavasti vielä vuosien ja vuosikymmenien ajan! Sivuillani on tekstejä ja kuvia myös paikoista, joissa olen käynyt sekä tietoja julkaisemistani kirjoista, artikkeleista, haastatteluista ja kirja-arvosteluista.