Featured Poet: In The Ether
In The Ether is a prominent poet on Instagram and has recently expanded access to his work by offering tee-shirts, mugs and bags featuring his poetry. We had the opportunity to interview him about his creative process and upcoming works.
Congratulations on releasing your debut line of products featuring highlights from your poetry! How did you choose what parts of your poems to feature on different items?
For much of my life, I carried things in secret. Things I've done, and things that have been done to me. The result of living like this for many years is the unshakable feeling of isolation; that feeling that no one could possibly relate to me. So, one of the goals of my work is to let other people know that they are not alone - particularly people who feel as though they have been cast aside by society. I keep this all in mind as I am deciding what to put on a t-shirt or a mug. Since both have very limited space on which to convey a substantial idea, I selected portions of my work that I believe can stand on their own and deliver a punch to the gut while making a human connection somehow - whether it's with the person wearing the t-shirt or the person who sees the person wearing the t-shirt. Same with the mugs, of course, although I realized during the process of selecting text for mugs that "Symphony" had the perfect text for two people in love having a hot drink together - so I had fun with those Symphony mugs, but I wouldn't put that text on a t-shirt. I want people to feel something powerful, something relatable, in a few words - and at the same time, communicate what Curb Stomp Contraband is about. Hopefully, I've been able to do that so far with what I currently have available in my shop.
Where do you draw inspiration from?
One of my driving inspirations comes from the most basic of things - a desire to express. Ignoring that desire for a very long time created intractable weight in my life that became desperately difficult to bear. I am a person with an addictive personality and have struggled with alcohol and substance abuse since my late teens. I was able to begin writing through some of that time in my early 20s, but quickly blew it off as something I shouldn't be doing, and I gave it up. I wasn't able to find words again until pretty recently, and it's been a cathartic process so far. If the things I write about didn't happen to me directly, they've been done to or by people who were close to me. I am heavily influenced by iconoclast poets. Jim Carroll, to me, represents having to grow up doing things that feed an addiction. His writings are all about the heavy labor it takes just to barely get by. I relate to that deeply. When I first read The Basketball Diaries, I thought, wow - he's writing about all of the shit he went through! So reading that made me believe that my stories also might be worthwhile to a few people out there. The Basketball Diaries led me to his other work - a collection of his poetry called Fear of Dreaming, which was the very first time I was absolutely blown away by someone's writing. In it, he writes about street life, which is what I consider myself to have experienced significantly, so his writing is entirely relatable to me. After reading his work, I felt that there were elements of him that resided in me, in my experiences and in my subconscious. Street art and graffiti is another major influence. KAWS is one artist that I remember seeing around a lot in the late 90s. I found his art transformative and that's what really grabbed me. A KAWS piece on a broken-down abandoned building altered it into a beautiful place. His art breathed vibrant life into the most mundane things - like bus stops. As someone who was constantly searching for beauty through peace but routinely surrounded by chaos, I was moved by KAWS's street presence and his ability to interpret whatever he encountered into something uniquely gratifying, uniquely his own. Understanding this helped me understand that I wanted to be able to do the same somehow.
What does your workspace look like?
I'm old school. I still write in 3x5 field notebooks while I'm traveling the subways between Jersey City and Manhattan. Whenever I'm wandering through Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, Little Italy, I find that images and scenarios come to me very quickly. I always have a notebook on hand so I don't get caught out there without a way to record what's happening in my mind and end up losing the moment. Of course, I use my phone to post completed work on Instagram, but I prefer to stay analog with my approach to a first draft. So, I don't have a singular, set workspace. My workspace is a subway car, a park bench, a street corner, a random doorway. It doesn't matter where I am as long as I have inspiration coming to me.
What is your motivation for writing?
Writing is the only medium I've discovered that helps me feel safe and comfortable.
I think the rest of my motivation for writing can be summed up in a poem I wrote called "Island." I write for the downtrodden and sometimes desperate. I write for the scapegoated, for the isolated, for the hopeless. Those are my people, because that's who I was, who I am. I guess I also write to tell them - and to tell myself - not to give up. And that by writing I haven't quite given up yet, and maybe, if we all hang in there together and take comfort in words, we'll all make it through this somehow. And maybe even flourish.
What does literary success look like to you?
Some of it is happening right now with you! Literary success to me is having my work exposed on as many platforms as possible, accessible to anyone and everyone. That includes Instagram and being published in Train River anthologies. On a larger scale, which I'm working toward, it would be to make a consistent full-time living at this. My future plans include writing novels and screenplays.
Where can readers read more of your work?
Right now, I'm most consistently found @in_the_ether_poetry on Instagram. Other than the writings in the Train River anthologies, my next project is a book of short stories that will be available by November 2020 on my website.