There are signs that museums have an appetite to acquire more digital artworks and even launch their own web3-driven projects. We’ve seen organizations like We Are Museums and LAL Art working directly with institutions to educate them on web3 through their WAC Museums and Factory programmes. More museum acquisitions are likely on the horizon, and if they are to represent a comprehensive canon it is critical that these collections include poetry.  

Poetry has always been a form of art: we’ve inscribed verses on objects from swords to jewelry, incorporated poetry in our decor, and presented poetry for display since the dawn of language. However, when we walk into most art museums, poetry is less frequently exhibited and rarely ever acquired. This is why we’re thrilled that Mad Arts has acquired 22 works from theVERSEverse, making it the largest digital poetry acquisition by a museum to date. This is a “MAD” moment not just for poetry on the blockchain, but poetry everywhere. As digital art pioneer Anne Spalter shared, “I’ve been in the art world for a long time and I never hear about museums acquiring poetry. I think this is the beginning of something important in the art historical canon.”

The rise of new technologies including blockchain allows poets to share and sell their poetry through new distribution mechanisms. Poets are no longer restricted to the paper page or ephemeral readings. They can collaborate with visual artists to create engaging multimedia experiences of their poetry. In “Consejo a la hija que nunca tendré, Para Rafaela”, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County, collaborated with LA new media artist Ellie Pritts to give new, hallucinatory dimension to a poem about motherhood imagined. When asked about the what the acquisition meant to her, Moro-Gronlier said, “I never imagined that this sort of cross-curricular, interdisciplinary world existed, nor did I ever think I’d see my work displayed on a wall in an art gallery, but now that I’ve discovered what’s possible in theVERSEverse, there’s no going back! Being a part of such cutting-edge poetry projects and integrative approaches to the creation, proliferation, and promotion of the creative arts inspires me to continue to collaborate with other artists in ways I never thought possible.”

Museum acquisitions reinforce the importance of poetry as public works of art. It makes the work more accessible to a wider audience, striking resonance in ways beyond what the artist originally imagined. As Kenyan artist May Naibo shared on our recent X Space about creating the visuals for Poetry Ambassador to Miami-Dade County Nicole Tallman’s poem “I Saw You”, “My hope is that we are not the end of the story. We want the audience to participate in this, to fill in the blanks. There’s no face or body [in the visual], so you can make this [artwork] part of your journey as well.” 

So, what’s next for poetry in museums? We hope other institutions will follow Mad Arts’ lead and include more poetry in their acquisitions as now more than ever, poem = work of art. In the meanwhile, we’re working  with Mad Arts to custom-design the poetry exhibition’s home in South Florida. Stay tuned for more on that front

—

lorepunk is a poet, copywriter and journalist based in the U.K.

Shannon Chen See // watchensee is a poet + web3 marketer responsible for theVERSEverse’s editorial branch.

— T. S. Eliot

You may have heard some variation of Eliot’s quote (“good artists steal”), perhaps attributed to someone else, like Steve Jobs or Pablo Picasso. Ironically, the statement itself is an excellent example of how creative work often builds on work that came before. As poets, we know one of the best ways to improve our own writing is to read widely, to be inspired by others. Making good art comes from a synthesis between our own unique experiences and interacting with others and their art. 

To celebrate poetry month, we’re honoring the poets who came before us. We asked a few poets from theVERSEverse community a simple question: “whose paths do you trace?” Here were their responses , peppered with some of my own reflections: 

Katie Dozier

Katie Dozier (KHD) is a poet, curator of The NFT Poetry Gallery, Prompt Series Editor at RattlePoetry, and Host of podcast ThePoetrySpace_

“Lately I’ve been most inspired by the poet Bob Hicok. Not only is he one of the best poets alive, I’m inspired by his dedication to “getting his ass in the chair” to write every day. Talking with him for episode #57: “The Flow State” on my podcast, The Poetry Space_, reminded me that a work ethic focused on continually striving to be a better creator is crucial as a poet—both in the more traditional realm and in our web3 world.”

Inspiration is multi-dimensional: a poet’s writing style, form, subject matter, or even their work ethic can inspire, as is the case with Katie being inspired by Bob Hicok. In my own writing journey, I’ve been grateful for writer friends who challenge me to show up and keep writing.  

OddWritings

OddWritings likes writing 0dd things such as word-unit palindrome poems. OddWritings is currently working on this book. 

“Two poets: William Butler Yeats and Anthony Etherin. I love Yeats’ imagery and lyrical music, and Etherin’s ability to write palindrome poems astounds me.”

Yeats’ lyricism has inspired countless poets, including me. I was previously unfamiliar with Anthony Etherin’s work, so I dug a bit deeper. I discovered that Etherin is the inventor of the aelindrome: “a new lettristic constraint, in which letters are parsed according to premeditated, palindromic numerical sequences.” There is a mathematical rigor that comes with experimenting with constraint in such a detailed manner, and I can only imagine how meticulous Etherin had to be to create the aelindrome. 

Lorepunk

Lorepunk is a web3 poet, copywriter, and essayist who writes for publications such as NFTNow, Accelerate Art, and gm3 Group.  

“Marilyn Hacker is a modern master of formal poetry and inspires me with her clarity, grace and rigour, and the fearlessness with which she approaches contemporary issues with the power of classical forms.”

Indulge me as I trace this line of inspiration further back. In this video, Marilyn Hacker reads “Rune of the Finland Woman” from a cycle of poems based on the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Snow Queen”. With this poem, she interweaves “The Snow Queen” with the story of her friend who cared for orphans in Hungary during WWII. This is a striking example of how poetry can be a tapestry of inspiration, weaving both people we know personally and those we feel like we know through their work. 

Elisabeth Sweet 

Elisabeth Sweet (a.k.a @speciesofvalue on X/Twitter) is a poet exploring patterns of randomness. She’s also Community Manager at theVERSEverse & FeralFile. 

“Maria Popova’s book Figuring rewired my brain, revealing the myriad ways art, poetry, and science entangle and uphold history and our human experience. Maria shows that you do not have to do or be only one thing in life, but rather you can weave a life that patterns according to your vast creative expression.”

What a beautiful, fluid framework for looking at the human experience. I too have wrestled with the myth that we have to be one thing in life. It takes time to unlearn and replace this myth with more nuanced frameworks like this one. 

Thank you to Katie, OddWritings, Lorepunk, and Elisabeth for honoring the poets who influence you. Sharing your inspirations gives a more intimate glimpse into how you became the poets you are today

Contextualizing the question of inspiration to the web3 world brings me back to my own journey into the space. Creator royalties piqued my interest in the space because I saw their potential to give creators their credit where credit is due. Royalties have since become a more complex question since 2020, and I’m excited by the potential of web3 technology to help us honor the inspirations who come before us. 

Whose paths do you trace? Starting today and throughout the month of April, we invite you to post a selfie of you with your favorite poem, book, chapbook, picture of a poet/author, hashtag #reVERSEverse + tag us @theVERSEverse. Happy Poetry Month

—

Shannon Chen See // watchensee is a poet + web3 marketer responsible for theVERSEverse’s editorial branch.

— Marie Howe, American poet and NY State Poet Laureate (2012-2014)

The question of whether art should be a public good is debated, with the resistance citing economic reasons. Opponents argue that resources used towards public art are better spent elsewhere, such as on education. Others opine that art means vastly different things to different people, and so its subjectivity makes it difficult for the government to evaluate whether it is an effective public good. 

Like Marie Howe, I believe poetry has a rightful place in the public eye. Public art serves as a medium for educating wider audiences on social and civic concerns. One longitudinal study found arts education correlated with improved educational outcomes and civic-minded behaviors in at-risk youth, demonstrating art can play a positive role in education. If we take a more holistic approach towards “value” beyond a narrow economic lens, we will see art “adds enormous value to the cultural, aesthetic and economic vitality of a community”.  

Public art has played a critical role in transforming communities with violent pasts, such as Comuna 13 in Medellín, Colombia, or acted as a platform to strengthen communities, support local artists, and attract cultural tourism such as in Montreal, Canada. 

Comuna 13 Mural in Medellín, Colombia

Web3 has introduced new models of value and creative mediums for poets. By extension, poets must reimagine the ways their audiences experience poetry. Public installations represent an immense onboarding opportunity to introduce the public to NFTs and show them the creative potential of the blockchain. 

theVERSEverse was proud to bring onchain poetry to the public last month as part of the IGNITE Art & Light Festival, produced by Mad Arts and The Broward County Cultural Division. The festival was free, open to all ages, and took place January 24-28th, 2024. Since 2022, IGNITE has grown from 10,000 visitors to over 30,000 in 2023. With two expansive locations in Fort Lauderdale and Dania Beach this year, the festival was able to accommodate even more people this year.

Patrons of IGNITE got to enjoy new ways of experiencing poetry. 3D holoboxes featured projections of poets Nicole Tallman, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, P. Scott Cunningham, Elisabeth Sweet, and Ana María Caballero reciting their poetry. IGNITE also exhibited “POESÍA DE PROTESTA”, a collection featuring 10 Spanish poems written by Hispanic women. The texts all express a form of protest – political, economic, sexual, or social. Each poem has been interpreted by a visual artist, with curation by Cuban historian and art professor Gladys Garrote. This feels particularly fitting as public art in itself is a protest against underlying systems that undervalue art. 

Full list of poets + artists who exhibited:

• Alexandra Lytton Regalado x Gab Floramica
• Amalia Moreno Restrepo x Genki Nishida
• Andrea Halaby x ARTJEDI1
• Caridad Moro-Gronlier x Ellie Pritts
• Fermina Ponce x Anya Asano
• Legna Rodríguez Iglesias x Tabitha Swanson
• Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas x Iván Casís Jr.
• Mia Leonin x Tuna Bora
• Silvina López Medin x NurArt
• Ana María Caballero x Roberto Salazar

IGNITE patrons selecting a poem to listen to, then experiencing holographic poets read to them

“POESÍA DE PROTESTA” exhibited at IGNITE 2024

On Tuesday January 30, Mad Arts opened as an art museum, exhibiting much of the work from IGNITE + more. theVERSEverse has some very exciting news in the coming weeks about poetry’s place there; stay tuned for that! All in all, my hope is that events like IGNITE will “stop us and give us something in common”, sparking new attitudes towards ourselves, others in our community, and web3 through art. 

— 

Shannon Chen See // watchensee is a poet + web3 marketer responsible for theVERSEverse’s editorial branch. 

In this conVERSEverse with Shannon Chen See, Nathaniel talks about his poetry journey, what makes the blockchain a unique medium, and his hopes for Web3. 

VV: Tell us a bit about your poetry journey before the blockchain. 

NS: Both of my parents are English teachers, so my love of language and word play goes way back. In college, I studied fashion design and music, and was part of a ska-reggae-pop band where I was the frontman and sang and wrote half the lyrics. We were featured in Playboy Magazine as a “Band on the Brink”. Boy, were they wrong. When the band split, I moved to New York for a graduate programme in digital art. I didn’t have time to do music anymore, but started doing the slam poetry circuit.

I started thinking: what if we replaced the performance stage with the screen? And so I started streaming video poetry as early as 1999. I used Quicktime Streaming and Flash — mediums which no longer exist — to do character-based narratives and twists on Greek origin stories. For example, Hektor, the Fallen Hero, was very articulate but he never wanted to speak about the traumatic past, and so he was always dodging and weaving. Odysseus, my traveler, wanted to tell you about his journey, but he was a stutterer.

After a while, I shed those characters and experimented with several other mediums like interactive installations using body tracking and slit scan photography while scuba diving. I’ve also spent considerable time writing more academic works: the first book about interactive installation, the second about non-human affect and bodies. 

Alongside my academic writing, for a solid 25 years or so, I engaged in performative networked art; these were often collaborations with Scott Kildall. We did one called “Wikipedia Art”, an intervention on Wikipedia. Like Wikipedia pages, it was an artwork that anyone could edit, as long as it followed Wikipedia’s rules, so you had to publish elsewhere and then cite back on Wikipedia. On the one hand, it was this beautiful art object that anyone could edit, but on the other hand it was this intervention into the power structures of knowledge to show that Wikipedia is just like every other knowledge base: mostly run by upper middle class white men. It exploded. Jimmy Wales – the Co-founder of Wikipedia – sued us for trademark infringement, and their lawyer, Mike Godwin – of Godwin law fame – called us trolls. It was incredible.

VV: How did the blockchain impact your poetry journey? 

NS: Scott and I tend to look at relatively new technologies and intervene in them just as they hit the mainstream, ie. which platform is everyone currently talking about, but not really understanding. I saw the Beeple sale and I saw the Eminem “Without Me” video on Saturday Night Live, and I said, “Shit, we’re here”. I called Scott immediately and I was like, “We need to fuck with the blockchain”. Initially, we naively thought of doing a really negative intervention because we had the same mainstream interpretation of the blockchain as everyone else – cartoon monkeys and money – but since we take our artist practice seriously we started by doing research. 

Rhea Myers reviewed my first book back in 2012, so I reached out to her saying, “Hey, R, tell me about the blockchain,” and we spoke for about an hour and a half. That conversation really accelerated my journey down the rabbit hole. 

As we dug deeper, what Scott and I found in the blockchain space was some really earnest, interesting communities doing experimental work, wanting to leverage this very libertarian capitalist system to do very socialist, anarchist things. 

My first project in the NFT space was with Scott Kildall, and heavily informed by Furtherfield, an organization pushing art and tech for eco-social change. I’ve been lucky to be a resident at Furtherfield and to have done three shows at their gallery. Scott and I worked on a project called “NFT Culture Proof”, a community-based participatory performance where everyone writes a story together, but the text itself is stored on-chain. Everybody loved it; nobody used it. Everyone talked about how cool it was, and in the end it just didn’t sell. The cheerleader in me wants to say, “Oh, it’s ahead of his time”, but I also might just not completely understand how the blockchain functions. 

Perhaps the best outcome of this project was stumbling on theVERSEverse and meeting Sasha, Ana, and Kalen. We were looking for crypto writers to collaborate with us and write prompts for the daily stories, and reached out to them to participate, so we all ended up working together on this. 

VV: How did you get involved with theVERSEverse?

NS: I had started playing with AI thanks to Anne Spalter. She had a show here in Milwaukee where she spoke about AI art, and that same night I went home and signed up for Google Collab and started coding with AI. 

Around this time, theVERSEverse founders realized I was streaming video poetry back in the 90s, and we started having conversations about me working with theVERSEverse. To be honest, I was apprehensive to get back to writing poetry, but then Sasha said, “Why don’t you try gen text?”

And that I felt more open to, because it felt like there was a co-pilot here, and I could play. That’s what artists do, right? The designer empathizes and the artist dumps the garbage bag on the table and sees what they can make. To me, AI is the garbage bag; it’s the non-human material.

AI is actually a nice progression to go from human bodies to non-human bodies to non-human thought. Once I started playing, I fell in love. Especially because as I started brainstorming, I realized that GPT3 could help me go back to my roots. It will know Hektor, and all my Greek characters from grad school because it’s been trained on 45 terabytes of text. So I set out to update these characters and try to get the AI to stutter, try to get the AI to perform these characters differently.

It all came full circle when Ana and I were brainstorming a collaborator for this, and I was like, “Oh, let’s fucking ask Anne Spalter. That would be so cool!”. Ana said, “Okay, here’s what we’ll do: let’s do spaceship twists on the concept because Anne loves space.” Anne said yes immediately. 

It feels so good to come full circle like this now. Admittedly, I’ve found much more of a home in visual art and in academic writing, but I’m really enjoying finding these new ways to collaborate around poetry again. I imagine I’ll start writing my own without the help of AI again too, but right now I’m really enjoying these AI poems with Anne Spalter and the work I’m doing with Sasha in generative AI, poetry, and art.

VV: What makes the blockchain different from other mediums you’ve worked with?

NS: First and foremost, for me the performative nature of the blockchain inherently makes it a time-based medium. Especially with this AI work that we’re doing, we have to partner it with blockchain because AI moves so rapidly that everything we make needs to be time stamped to show that history and progression.

The first-ever public-facing thing I did with blockchain was to write an article on my website about conservation and what the blockchain affords because of it. The idea that, now that when you buy a work, there’s the potential for custodianship and archiving that didn’t exist before. I used to sell my interactive installations for peanuts just to get into a museum collection with the hope that someone would care enough to maintain it on a regular basis. It’s unlikely that they are or they have been. But when it comes to the blockchain — and this is where the forces of capitalism are at play — it’s actually a good thing that people are spending a lot of money on it, because that means they’re going to look after it.

Rhea Meyers and Simon de la Rouviere’s work really spoke to me early on when it came to the blockchain. The kind of conceptual, performative, platform-based work that played with both the meaning and the work and its implications. That being said, that’s not to devalue the work of artists who are just putting JPEGs on-chain, because I think that too is a performance like going to do a poetry reading. 

I think we’re just beginning to understand the nuance to the different ways we can use blockchain as a medium. I’ve done things where I just had to update a flash poem, convert it to MP4, put them on-chain where the metadata of the work says “This is when this was actually made and this is how it was created”. 

And then I’ve got stuff where I’m really glad I minted it as soon as I did. I was looking at AI bias and so I made this whole body of work called “Are computers racist?” and I insisted on doing it in one day because I didn’t want to craft too hard. I didn’t want it to make computers look racist; I wanted to show where that inherent bias lay on that day. 

VV: What is your hope for Web3?

NS: Web3 is coming, and now is the time we can decide as much as possible what this future internet will be and look like. Web1 was the information age, Web2 was the buying and social media age, and Web3 is trans-dash-actional. The question is: do our trans-dash-actions have to only be monetary? Although capitalism does back it and it’s built on libertarian foundations, fighting too much with that is like fighting gravity, so how do we leverage it? 

At Ecolabs — a startup I’ve co-founded with Sev Nightingale and Samantha Tan — we’re trying to leverage Web3 to reverse climate change. What does that look like? Well, one of the ways is to work with small farmers who it’s not worth it for large companies that do carbon sequestration to work with. Firstly, we pay them through Web3. There are no intermediaries; we can easily send them money. Secondly, whereas other companies have an outcomes-based approach, we are trying to transform farming practices forever. Instead of paying the same farmer each year to not cut a tree down, we front the cost and convert a farmer permanently to no-till and rotational crops. 

Without this approach, they would’ve lost money for the first two years converting to a new practice, but in the long term they make more money because it’s actually better for their crops, and that sequestration can continue in permanence.

We’re also leveraging Web3 for the votes that govern our decisions as an organization: how do we decide who we want to work with? That’s where DAOs can help us make more decentralized, democratic decisions. It’s not perfect, but it’s still far more democratic and community-oriented than a company is. I’d like to see more action-oriented NFTs in the future that help communities self govern and self sustain.

—-

Check out Nathaniel’s work on theVERSEverse here. Dive into his other work on his website, nathanielstern.com.

written by Shannon Chen See, community member of theVERSEverse and Senior Marketing Manager at Async Art. Follow her on Twitter @watchensee. 

In this conVERSEverse, Nicole talks about why she is a poet, her experience collaborating with visual artists, and shares advice for poets aspiring to publish their work. 

VV: Tell us a bit about why you write poetry. 

NT: I’ve written poetry since I was a child because I have always heard it, but I didn’t really start publishing my poetry until 2020. Though I’ve engaged in several mediums, poetry in particular speaks to me because it’s the best medium for communication in a succinct way. It’s the perfect container for expressing my most intimate thoughts and for evoking emotion in and connecting with others. And there’s so much flexibility with poetry. I tend to write mostly prose poetry, and I love the space it affords and that the rules can be bent so easily. 

VV: Why is pop culture such a central part of your work?

NT: I try to approach poetry from a position of relatability and accessibility, and I also try to write poems that I think will resonate with people who may not necessarily like poetry. I love it when poets love my work, but I also love it when people who don’t necessarily like poetry tell me they like my poems and say to me, “Wow, I didn’t even know that that’s what a poem could be.”

Pop culture helps me to bridge the gap with everyday people who may not necessarily have an MFA, or may not have any formal training and makes my work more relatable. I find that the poems that people like the most of mine are the ones that use relatable concepts like television shows or well-known characters. For example, I’ve written poems about The Sopranos, Firestar (a Marvel cartoon character), and Paris Hilton.

Something else I like about pop culture is it’s really reflective of the moment. When you’re reading older poetry, poets back then were trying to do the same thing. They were looking at what was going on around them, and they were using that as a way to situate their work. Similarly, pop culture reflects our society’s current values. By capturing this moment, I’m also capturing some of our history and it serves as a time capsule for future generations. 

VV: Tell us about your experience writing Something Kindred. 

NT: It’s funny because the initial draft of this book was about the pandemic; a book called The New Normal. I pitched it to Clifford Brooks, the founder of The Southern Collective Experience. He read it, was frank with me, and said he thought that people were tired of the pandemic and by extension any content about it. 

I could see what he was saying and so I set out to rework the book. As I went back through the material, I realized there was more to my words than just the pandemic. My mother passed away from ovarian cancer in 2017, and it took me about five years to find the courage to write about that. I noticed the poems I labeled as pandemic poems were really grief poems. I was processing this parallel loss between my mother’s death and our communal loss as a result of the pandemic. I ended up scrapping the pandemic-specific poems and turning my work into a non-linear grief handbook for people to process loss, regardless of what they’re grieving. 

VV: Do you have any advice for poets aspiring to publish their work?

NT: To people who are trying to publish a first book, I would say be patient because it might take a while to land. It will take some perseverance, but keep writing, and strive to get your work published in journals. This can be an important step towards finding the right home and the right publisher.

Be open, be flexible, send your work out, and maybe do some open calls. If you’re going to enter a contest, make sure your work is really ready because you can be paying upward of $25 per contest to submit and that can add up quickly.

I’d also advise writers to be active on social media, too. I know a lot of people say they don’t like Twitter, but it can be a valuable resource for connecting with people.  

Lastly, don’t necessarily feel like you have to be in the top-tier journals right away. Some people think “I’m not going to publish unless I can be in The New Yorker or The Paris Review”, but I’d say start small, maybe with some local publications, and then slowly progress upwards into some of those bigger journals. 

VV: How was your experience collaborating with artists on visuals for your work? 

NT: With theVERSEverse, I submitted my poems to co-founder Ana Maria Caballero, and then she paired me up with artists. I loved what all three artists did with my work. Ana was the connector, a matchmaker of sorts, and it turned out remarkably well. 

Brook Getachew was the artist for Poem for Sylvia Plath. At first, I didn’t really understand his interpretation. I looked at it and said, “Well, this is beautiful. I don’t get it, but it’s beautiful.” I wrote back to Ana asking for the artist’s interpretation of the piece, and he wrote back this very thoughtful explanation of why he did what he did.

I had recorded myself reading the poem, which we originally thought we would use, but Brook felt it was distracting the viewer from the overall composition. Instead, to make sure there was that personal element, he asked to send over my thumbprint to include in the piece. I was actually traveling and I didn’t have much with me. I realized I had some red lipstick from my purse, ran that over my thumb, and put it on a piece of hotel paper. I took a picture of it, sent it over, and said, “This is all I have, I don’t have an ink pad or a pencil or anything. Will this work?”. Brook loved it because of the beautiful red color and ended up using it in the visual.

When you put art out into the world, you have no idea how someone else will interpret it. To see these artists take in my work and then produce something in a completely different direction than what I could have imagined was a magical experience. 

VV: What is your hope for the poetry space at large?

NT: I would like to see poets celebrated and elevated more as artists and to be fairly compensated. That’s one reason why I love theVERSEverse, and this idea of “poem = work of art.” A lot of times when people hear “artist,” they don’t think of poets. They think of visual artists, musicians, photographers, etc.

There are a few poets out there, like Rupi Kaur, who has a world tour and is treated like she’s a rock star, but examples are still few and far between. I also don’t know that all poets would want that level of fame because it can be difficult for people, especially if they’re introverted, but I would like to see more poets in the spotlight, and especially poets whose work I really admire. 

Being a poet is a very special skill set, and I don’t think it’s fair for people to expect us to do everything for free. A lot of times we’re expected to write poems for free and to do readings for free, but our heart and soul goes into our work, and that work should be fairly compensated. 

I work for the Mayor of Miami-Dade County as her Legislative Affairs Director and Poetry Ambassador. I’m extremely grateful for my job, but I also think it’s unfortunate that a lot of us poets end up doing things outside of our art in order to sustain ourselves. Imagine if poets could be sustained just on our poetry. Wouldn’t that be cool?

—-

Check out Nicole’s work on theVERSEverse here

written by Shannon Chen See, community member of theVERSEverse and Senior Marketing Manager at Async Art. Follow her on Twitter @watchensee

VV: Tell us a bit about your poetry journey before the blockchain

CB: In graduate school, I was writing poetry in an effort to get published. While my writing was adequate and publishable, I was unhappy with the results, and I became convinced that I wasn’t going to make an important contribution to the field. A friend introduced me to the work of the Language poets, and I realized that there was an entire avant-garde, experimental history that no one had told me about. I then realized that, up until that point, I was trying to become the kind of poet I should be rather than the kind of poet I could be.

After this discovery, I was able to more freely explore my fixation on crystals and mineralogical imagery, and I produced my first published work Crystallography. This work spawned a subsequent greater challenge: Eunoia. The book is written in five chapters, each telling a story, but using only one of the five vowels. For example, in the first chapter, the only vowel that appears is the letter “A,” and I can use no other vowels. After seven years of concerted work, the book came to fruition. I won the Griffin Prize for it, and it became one of the most bestselling books of poetry ever in the history of Canada.

VV: Tell us a bit about what you’re working on now, The Xenotext 

CB: Eunoia’s positive reception gave me permission to do something even weirder — a project that became The Xenotext. It has so far taken 20 years of effort, and I am still working on it. Essentially, I am genetically engineering a bacterium so that it becomes not only an archive for storing my poem, but also a machine for writing a poem in response.

I’ve written two very short sonnets, enciphering one of them into the genome of a bacterium. When the poem is inserted into the genetic code of the bacterium, the cell interprets the sonnet as a set of instructions for building a protein. The sequence of amino acids in this protein enciphers the other poem, producing a meaningful insight in response to my first poem.

The last step is getting this to work in a bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans, which is capable of surviving in all types of hostile environments: scorching, freezing, one thousand times the dose of gamma radiation that would obliterate a human being, even the open vacuum of outer space. If I’m successful, I would effectively be creating a book that could outlast terrestrial civilization.

VV: How did you get into NFTs?

CB: I’m an experimental poet, so I go wherever the experiments are. Back in the late 1990s, I helped found a literary movement called Conceptualism. Part of its contribution involves a response to the advent of the Internet. We were attempting to create poetry that would be responsive to the new environment online.

At the time, peers thought we were nuts for doing so. They thought that the Internet was not well-suited to poetry. We were told it was a scam-ridden space and a pollutant danger to the environment. The critiques sounded very much like the kinds of complaints that we currently hear about the blockchain — and I feel very lucky I get to relive my youth twice.

Right now, there’s a great deal of skepticism among my contemporaries about the merits of the blockchain. I’m trying to convince my peers who make these familiar complaints that this technology is an important milieu to think about and to contribute to. I don’t want to be so old in my career that I can’t continue to participate in the new innovations that appear on the horizon.

VV: What’s been your biggest challenge bringing poetry to NFTs?

CB: It’s the challenge everybody is figuring out: how to overcome the enormous barriers to entry into the new environment. How to purchase the currency, how to obtain a wallet, how to navigate the environment safely, how to contribute something, and then how to promote it. All of these features of the environment are not obvious. They’re time-consuming, and potentially expensive.

But despite these challenges, there are enormous affordances. I enjoy the community of people here, which is fecund with a lot of imaginative, speculative creativity. It’s not like the milieu of poetry outside this environment — a milieu that has recently become more cutthroat. On the blockchain, the quality of engagement and the spirit of support are simply more exciting, more conducive to collaboration.

VV: Where do poetry NFTs go from here?

CB: Anything that I might suggest is not prescriptive, but rather speculative. I think that poets have to range further outside the catechism of their literary training to do things of interest. You might have to learn how to program a computer, or how to sit at a lab and engineer a bacterium. 

I think that greater engagement with the culture of science will be an important feature of future poetry. Short of the economy, the most important cultural activity that we do on the planet is science. It is our greatest hope for being able to weather any cosmic threats that might arise. And yet, there’s little poetry about our scientific advancement — which I think is a shortcoming.

Overall, the future of poetry is going to be very disparate. I don’t know what all the new things might be, but I want to be among the people who are trying to innovate.

Check out Christian’s work on theVERSEverse here

written by Shannon Chen See, community member of theVERSEverse and Senior Marketing Manager at Async Art. Follow her on Twitter @watchensee