This latest post has been a long time coming... years in fact. It's not that I've been short of inspiration, but short of the time needed to put things into words. However, I've decided to push my perfectionist nature to one side and discard the mantra of quality over quantity and just write more!
I just got back from a few days in New York. This was my first trip to the Big Apple and I found plenty of inspiration amongst the towering scrapers of Manhattan and the sweet suburban streets of Williamsburg.
These few days were a period of discovery - seeing so many things for the first time - but also of rediscovery. Within the independent bookshops and record stores, I found myself surrounded by generations of the best literary and musical talents America has offered the world, and also the aspirations of millions of hopeful authors, poets and musicians, releasing limited edition demos and home made anthologies printed in limited runs on ragged printer paper. That period of my life, where I hoped to be a concert flautist, a singer or a wildly successful author - whose books, although niche, appealed to a mass of similarly disillusioned and cynical teenagers and adults(!) - seems to have all but disappeared. Sadly the dreams have been replaced by the carbon copy mindset of a 20-something professional (although with no profession to speak of!) worrying about what my boss thinks and what my parents think and what the man standing opposite me at the bus stop thinks about the person I have become.
I am lucky enough to have a job that is quite interesting and am living in a lovely flat in a fairly respectable part of South London with a pretty brilliant man. But we're all still lost, right? And I'm beginning to realise that it's OK to feel like that. I'm currently studying part-time for another degree in an attempt to ensure that I am not completely lost in this shell of Zara shift dresses and M&S heels (comfort over couture) forever and am slowly realising that there is (deep breath Londoners!) MORE. TO. LIFE. THAN. THIS! I realise that I am a massive 'coming-of-age' at the age of 25 cliche, but hey, if you can't beat them.....
So, I'm going to dive back into blogging to write about the things that inspire me. The first of which is the poetry of a lady called Rose McAleese - a Seattle based poet who is younger than me (of course!) and wonderfully talented. I discovered her anthology carefully piled up in a book shop in Williamsburg. The book had no price tag and, despite an extensive search, the 3 shop assistants were unable to work out who she was or how much they should charge for her book. In the end, they took $8, which seemed more than fair for a fairly extensive collection. I have since investigated (with a little help from my friend Google) and have established that Rose distributed copies of poems randomly before its release, sometimes within books in second-hand book shops, and you can just imagine the joy this would bring to an avid reader midway through a classic - an additional literary bonus! A video of this can be seen here. See also this video of her performing her poem 'A Woman's Will'.
I don't know whether it is just the poetry that I find inspirational or the spirit and freedom she represents but, either way, I'm really enjoying her work. And perhaps just a little Kerouac spirit has travelled home with me to London... here's hoping!
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