Happy Feature Friday!

Today we’re featuring our first poet ever, (!!!) Nash Consing! We love to share different talents with you guys and think you’ll love what Nash writes. His poems, although short, have so much emotion packed into them! You can see more of his writing on Instagram where you’ll get lost reading all of his amazing stuff. On top of that, we love how he handwrites his poetry to give it that authentic vibe. Keep reading to hear about Nash’s creative background and get a peek at his very own poems. He also has a book out that’s a compilation of his work which you can find here!

: Tell us a little about yourself and how you got your start in poetry.

: My name is Nash Consing. I am sixteen years old and a junior in high school. I live in North Carolina, but my parents are from the Philippines. Things I do include being a drum major and marching band playing the saxophone on a regular basis, along with listening to various types of music, mostly rap and alternative rock.

I think the reason I started writing poetry is how you would expect a fifteen year old boy beginning to write poetry. There was a girl I liked, and unfortunately she was going to move away from my city at the end of the year. At this point I had never really openly expressed my emotions from the romantic side of my heart to anyone, But I followed this account on Instagram, @emolabs, and he wrote these super short and sweet romance poems and photographed them with beautiful sceneries in the background, and it seemed that even the vague ones seemed to had impacted my heart in an unexplainable way. And so then, with two weeks left in the school year, I decided that I would write a notebook full of poems like @emolabs did on his Instagram account. I didn’t do it in time, so then I just made an Instagram account and eventually she saw them.

: We love how short, but poignant your poems are. What made you mostly stick to shorter form poetry?

: The main reason I stick to shorter forms of poetry is because of the way @emolabs made me feel as the freshman in high school with a heartache for a girl. There is something special about the ability to make someone feel totally fulfilled or utterly destroyed with a poem that’s under 30 words. I think the poetry I write is simple in wording, but emotionally complex. Before writing poetry, I wasn’t really into literature much at all. And I think my poetry is special because you don’t have to like poetry or reading to understand the layers of emotion that I felt as I was writing these poems.

: Where do your ideas/inspiration come from to write?

: I think it is interesting what inspires me. I’m not a big reader myself, so literature isn’t really a huge inspiration for me to write. I always write based on true emotions, otherwise my poems or my short stories would have no validity to me personally. There are times when I’ll be extremely sad, really lonely, or just completely lovestruck, and there are all these emotions stirring in my heart that have reached a boiling point. And when it feels like that, I sort of just let my words flow onto my phone or into my notebook. When I do that I call it “writing on impulse”. But I can be inspired by literally anything that I notice as my day goes on. I went to New York on a band trip last spring, and our hotel was in New Jersey, so we had to drive to the city every morning, and so I saw the skyline every morning. And just seeing the beauty of the city horizon fueled me to write so passionately about romance and life in a city setting.I also remember a time when I was at a rehearsal for indoor percussion (I march cymbals) and I was having a discussion with my friends about the vastness of the universe, and the discussion of how our existence could be as small as a water particle or as big as a sea, and that inspired me to write a poem in that subject’s theme. I also usually write to music. Since the beginning, Bon Iver’s music has been the most influential on everything I’ve written. There’s a particular mood I get in when I listen to Bon Iver. It’s a mood that motivates me to express my emotions.

: On Instagram, you usually display your poems in a handwritten, journal format. Why do you think people like your posts visually?

: I think the “handwritten notebook aesthetic” is special because it just feels so much more personal between the writer and the audience. I strive to impact the people that read my work, and I think the handwritten aspect really comes into play when that happens. There’s something satisfying about reading something that is handwritten because as humans we demand to feel the maximum capacity of emotion, and when someone reads the scribble of my words they look at and they instantly think “Wow, someone actually feels the same way I do.” At least that’s how I felt when I first read @emolab’s work.

: Tell us how many journals do you have full of poems!? Do you have an idea of how many different poems you have written in total?

: Currently, I am on notebook fifteen. Looking back on my posts that I’ve uploaded to my Instagram, I probably have a little less 600 poems. I keep dates on my poetry notebooks, from the day I start to the day I finish the notebook. Sometimes I’ll write through a notebook within a week, but then sometimes it’ll take me a couple months to finish one. It just depends on what is happening in my life that determines the amount of work I write. I can’t force anything. But it can be at times frustrating to not produce something I’m proud of for a couple of weeks. That’s happened to me before, and when it does, I feel like I’m stuck standing still on a treadmill that’s going backwards. But I know that eventually I will find inspiration in something beautiful, so I usually have to tell myself to just be patient, and so far it has worked.

: What do you aim to get across with your poetry and why do you think people respond to your poems in such a positive way?

: My poetry has become a means of expressing my feelings, mostly for myself. If I were to intentionally write to make an audience feel a certain way, there would be no emotional foundation to anything that I have written. I’m an emotional person, and my poetry is emotionally fueled, so I try to maximize the the emotions that I feel with the set of vocabulary that I am given. I think people respond to my poems so positively because I think that in a bridge of understanding between a writer and an audience, there’s no way that the bridge will fully be connected, but I think mine is rather close to my audience. I’ve seen that in all of the phases of my poetry. There were times where I wrote mostly about heartbreak, and I received a lot of positive feedback from that series of poems. Everyone is feeling something, whether it’s happiness or loneliness, and when I feel a certain emotion, there will always be people in the same boat searching for the comfort in any form. The form they find when they find me just happens to be poetry.

: Do you have a favorite poem you have written? How about your favorite poem written by someone else?

: That’s a tough question. I have a lot of favorites, but the one that comes to mind is:

My favorite poem by @emolabs is:

I can’t say I won’t miss you
but I hope your tears have dried
because heartbreak is not knowing
at we’ll always know we tried

: Poetry has a made a comeback through social media! Why did you choose this platform to get your poetry out there and what do you like about it?

: I chose Instagram as a form of poetry because it was the only thing I really knew. I had never been interested in poetry prior to discovering it on Instagram, so I sort of just followed the trends and discovered something that has greatly influenced the past two years of my life.

I love the community that is built on “Instagram poetry”. I’ve met some of my closest friends from writing poetry on Instagram. I’ve even met a couple outside of Instagram. This summer, I met my closest Instagram friend, @lunar.bloodstreams in Florida while on vacation. I also went to this five week camp, North Carolina Governor’s School East, and on the second day there, I was standing in a salad line when a girl in front of me looked at me in a peculiar way. I asked why she looked at me like that and it turns out that she recognized me from my poetry account on Instagram. We’re a lot more than friends now.
I love the poetry community on Instagram because everyone is so passionate about their own work and everyone else’s. It feels great to read into someone else’s life and feel goosebumps along the edges of my heart.

: What is next for you? Any exciting projects/collabs coming up?

: Right now, I’m a junior in high school, so college is fast approaching in my view. I hope to achieve my dream and write creatively as a profession. Of course it’s a gamble in a business that is so competitive and demanding, but this is just the beginning of what I can become. I’m determined to pursue the thing that brings out the most inside of me. I have a quote taped to my wall by filmmaker and Youtuber Casey Neistat that says “The only thing between ‘you’ and ‘everything you’ve ever wanted to do’ is doing it.” I don’t know exactly how or when I’ll get there, but every day I’m working towards pursuing what I love. There have been a few publishing groups that have emailed me, but it’s hard since I’m under eighteen.

Recently, I’ve been into longer forms of writing, like short stories, and I’m working on building a portfolio of them. Maybe I’ll release them when I have enough that are good enough for my standards.

: Do you have any advice for those seeking to write their own poetry or those just starting out?

: I think the most important thing about starting poetry, or any art form for that matter, is to not be afraid to express yourself. There’s a societal mask that we are trained to have in order to fit in, but with poetry you are left with the universe at your fingertips. I think at first it may be hard to write on your own if you feel inspired to write from a specific piece or a song or whatnot. But as long as you are speaking from your heart and it is translating on paper, then you’re doing it right. The outcome may be terrible to you at the beginning like it was to me, but all it takes is practice. Always search for inspiration, and once you find what you’re looking for, never let it go.