Real progress...

I have a rather important announcement just to make …

I’M WRITING FOR THE HUFFINGTON POST!!

(I think you’ll agree that this is news that is worthy of the capitals and the two exclamation marks…)

This is a MAJOR step forward. The Huffington Post is a very well-known news site in America, and they’ve started a website in England to try and mimic the same success. In the journo-world, to be able to say you write for this site is a pretty good thing. It’s voluntary blogging much like this (although I’ll try and make it a bit more serious each time!) which is ideal experience for my columnist career dreams.  

Yet when I excitedly blurted the news out to my friends, I was (9 out of 10 times) answered with ‘The WHAT post?!’ So, it seems that whilst I’ve made one little toddler step towards writing professionally with a big, renowned site to my mind & those in the writing profession, to the rest of the world (i.e. my lovely friends) it’s still a bit of an unknown…

But you just wait, The Huffington Post & I will rise to the forefront of your minds until every time you hear that name, your eyes will light up & your minds will frantically race to conjure up the latest exciting story you read on there the night before.

We WILL succeed.

(I’d better hope so, because if I don’t know I’ll look incredibly stupid after that determined almost heroic-like statement…)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/stephanie-allen}

Poetic Inspiration

So, this week is a bit of a different entry...
Yes I know, I say that every week, but it really is different. Really.
This week, is poetry.

I was sitting in a seminar this morning, reading the poetry of Frank O'Hara. A poet, I'll admit, I'd never heard of before. We were meant to be reading his collection titled 'Lunch Poems', but our brilliant tutor got us to discuss one called 'Having a coke with you'. There were two lines that caught my eye: 'the secrecy our smiles take on' and the image of 'a tree breathing through its spectacles'. The latter I love as an image, even if I'm still not completely certain what he means...(interpretations welcome!) whilst the former inspired me.
It inspired me to write.
And this is what I came up with: (NO COPYING!)

That Feeling

It’s the feeling that makes words become redundant,
When patterns of syllables aren’t needed to convey meaning
One look,
One smile,
Our own language is all we need to understand each other.

It’s that idea that we have our own little world,
we’re our own unit,
Us against the world,
Us within the world.
Together.

It’s accepting that we annoy each other
It’s knowing when the other is annoyed.
Yet talking,
laughing about it
Believing we’re better together, irritated, than not at all.

It’s the feeling that can brighten the everyday
Provoke that cute smile that you like so much
That emits like a radiance just over a thought
so the person seated next to me,
on the bus
gives me a strange stare.

It’s the comfort that comes from being in your arms
Safe and happy.
Sharing and silent.
Snug.
In a space where I feel like I belong.

It’s that feeling…
                              …that feeling…
                                                          …it’s love.  

Muddled Thoughts

Tempting as it is to jump on the bandwagon and write something about the Kony 2012 campaign, which has been impossible to miss unless you’ve had your laptop off and your head in a hole for the last few days… I’m instead going to rather selfishly focus on a mini personal triumph.

I’ve done it. I’ve finally made a decision about my dissertation topic!
(*Cue loud applause and tears of joy!*)
Yet, whilst I’m relieved about putting weeks of indecisiveness to an end, I’m also slightly subdued.

It’s occurred to me that whilst I’ve finally picked something to focus on, I’ve also eliminated a whole world of literature. In comes sentimentalism and the social reform novels of Dickens and Gaskell, but out goes the propaganda voices of WW1; the social injustices of post-colonial Graceland; the racial prejudices of Benjamin Zephaniah, the love from the Romantics, and out goes the politics of George Orwell. 

During a conversation with one of my tutors, I realised that out of a whole world of literature, I’ve chosen to focus on novels from the nineteenth century. True, I’m focusing on the issues within that which I find extremely interesting & engaging; social reform & injustice, poverty, gender…yet look at how much I’m also neglecting!

Now, obviously I can’t write my dissertation on the entirety of literature, that’s just silly. But I suppose that it’s finally dawned on me quite how much you can find in literature that can grip you and draw you in to its world. When I discussed with the same tutor modules for next year, this really hit home. 

It seemed to me that specialising could also be coined limiting.

But I suppose that, on reflection, just because I’ve chosen to focus on one topic for my dissertation, there’s nothing to stop me pursuing my own directions and thriving off words from the likes of D.H.Lawrence, Shakespeare, Abani, Coetzee, Plath… it just won’t be critically assessed!
 I guess I just wanted to have my hand in every biscuit tin as it were…

I wonder if, alongside some of these writers that I’m so reluctant to forget about, anyone will ever be reluctant to forget this blog and these words in progress...