Of course, I am open to making new friends and to the new experiences that come along with them, but I also cherish my old friends and welcome their visits. When I reread a book, it often feels like a reunion, and I learn something new about this friend and my appreciation grows. 

When thinking of poetry and lineage, I think of a book that I reread each summer. It  feels like a poem because it invokes the senses so strongly. This book is Perfume by Patrick Süskind. It is the novel I have read the most times as an adult, and I wrote a poem for theVERSEVerse called “I Saw You” that is inspired by this book, my first encounter with it, and my experience reading and rereading it. This book takes me back to 1997 in Aix-en-Provence, France, each time I read it, which was a very special time in my life. I was studying abroad between my junior and senior years of college, and also beginning to come to terms with my queerness. I was infatuated with this woman who had a copy of Perfume, and the speaker of the poem takes a few liberties when describing this time and this woman, as poets are allowed to do.

Because I am a poet, I feel inclined to use this space to tell you about the poetry book I have read the most times as an adult, which is Ariel by Sylvia Plath. I turn to this book again and again for its music and imagery. I also mention this book and poet because I wrote another poem for theVERSEverse called “Poem for Sylvia Plath.” This poem is epistolary and is meant to tell Sylvia all the things I wish she could be alive to hear, including how important she is to modern poetry. My obsession with Sylvia Plath has recently found its way into a novel I have coming out this summer called Julie, or Sylvia, but I digress.  

Rereading books for me is like spending time with an old friend—the kind of friend in whose company I pick right up where we left off, even if we haven’t spoken in a while. We likely have both grown in some way since we last spoke, and our lived experiences may change the type of conversation we have with each other. Each visit adds a new, exciting element to our relationship, and we continue to evolve together through space and time. 

– – – 

“I Saw You” is presented in collaboration with May Naibo and exhibited in theVERSEverse’s SuperRare Genesis Gallery. “Poem for Sylvia Plath” is presented in collaboration with Brook Getachew. curated by Linda Dounia.

Nicole Tallman is a poet, writer, and editor. Born and raised in Michigan, she lives in Miami and serves as the official Poetry Ambassador for Miami-Dade County, Editor of Redacted Books, Poetry and Interviews Editor for The Blue Mountain Review, an Associate Editor for South Florida Poetry Journal, and a reader for The Los Angeles Review. She is the author of Something Kindred and Poems for the People (The Southern Collective Experience (SCE) Press), and FERSACE (ELJ Editions).

— 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.

I had the great honor of speaking with aurèce vettier about the series in the lead up to the exhibition. le travail des rêves blends dreams and memories to express the deepest vulnerabilities of the human experience. Symbols of grief, love, awe, mystery, fear, and power emerge from the conversation between aurèce vettier and the algorithm he trained on the visual record of his life.

My interview with aurèce vettier will be published in Le Random Editorial during Bright Moments Paris. For now, I am delighted to share a glimpse of our conversation with readers of conVERSEverse.

xx VV, Elisabeth Sweet

Elisabeth Sweet: To decipher a dream, one may begin by naming what they see, feel, and remember. In a sense, these labels become the attributes of one’s personal dreamscape. Did you assign attributes for the works in le travail des rêves? If so, what are they?

aurèce vettier: Yes, absolutely. The token itself has a mechanical reference, so each image’s traits are recorded in the metadata along with the title of the piece. There are six attribute categories: Location, Feeling, Element, Is a bearded man present?, Is Death around?, and Is she sending a sign?

For example, token AV-2024-U-416 is titled “a multitude of moons appearing in the night sky”

Location: Sky

Feeling: Mysterious

Element: Air

Is a bearded man present? No

Is Death around? No

Is she sending a sign? Yes

The least common Element is Ether, the ancient fifth element of the Greeks. 

ES: Did you choose the images based on traits or assign traits later?

av: I curated the pieces that I felt were the strongest for the series, then I tried to be honest with the rarity traits. The rarity traits are conceptual, as a way to highlight the important transfer elements of the dreams and connect the pieces together.

ES: I understand that you hand painted several of the images from the series. Tell us about that.

av: I translated 35 of the works into oil paintings. These are the most personal pieces in the series, and it was important for me to create them specifically. I wanted collectors to give collectors the possibility of having a physical piece. Between February 21st and 24th, the collectors of any token can order the corresponding oil painting.

I am organizing an exhibition of some of these oil paintings and a cocktail party on February 21st at Bigaignon 18 Rue du Bourg-Tibourg, 75004, Paris. From 20:30 – 23:00, close to the Bright Moments Café. Everyone is welcome to attend!

ES: I believe it takes a measure of courage to release an artwork into the world. le travail des rêves is a remarkably personal piece, inviting the audience into your dreamspace, perhaps the only remaining realm of privacy these days. Did releasing this work require a different kind of emotional labor?

av: It was a huge emotional investment to create this series, but when it was complete, I knew intuitively that it had left the personal sphere and entered the global sphere.

It’s worth noting that this is part of a continuous body of work, which means I can put stop marks where I want and it doesn’t mean the story is over. Maybe that’s why I can bear to say that this particular series is complete. It’s part of a global, wider narrative that is never really finished.

– – – 

if you’re in Paris next week, please join aurèce vettier for a exhibition + cocktail party to celebrate le travail des rêves

Bigaignon 18 Rue du Bourg-Tibourg, 75004, Paris

20:30 – 23:00

be on the lookout for the full conversation, to be published in Le Random Editorial next week

– – – 

aurèce vettier embodies a collaborative, open, and hybrid approach through an algorithm-generated alias. This identity, like all of aurèce vettier’s work, bridges the ‘real’ and ‘data’ spaces. In the tangible world, it allows creation—drawing, painting, sculpting—while in the virtual realm, using artificial intelligence, it explores multidimensional forms. Since 2019, the machine-generated elements serve as raw material, expanding conceptual possibilities rather than being finished works.

Elisabeth Sweet is a poet exploring patterns of randomness. Her poetry has been exhibited in New York City, Paris, and Tallinn. She is part of the core team at theVERSEverse and supports exhibition production at Feral File. Through writing and live interviews, Elisabeth cultivates conversations with artists and curators around process, values, and meaning. Find her on X/Twitter at @speciesofvalue and read her other writing on Substack.

— 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

VV: How did you get into poetry NFTs?

JDM: I’ve always been a poet and a writer, but I focused more on the visual art of NFTs at the start. The space opened up very quickly. It went from putting up jpegs and selling them to this space of profound changes for culture itself, and that included writing. I hadn’t met Ana [Caballero] or Sasha [Stiles] or anyone in theVERSEverse before I started my first poetry project in collaboration with Anna Malina called Canoeing Time, 1992. Then I quickly got up to speed with GPT3 through Sasha and James Yu who is producing a lot of interesting NFTs based on the written word. James invited me to sign up for Sudowrite and I started experimenting with that. (See Managed Miles and SLOW GODS)

Machine-human collaborations are very profound. It’s not just between artists and artists and writers, it’s everyone interacting with this new, hulking machine which is improving and changing all the time. We are all in this poetic ball rolling down hill and no one knows where it’s going to end up! The written word and poetic expression have found not just a new voice, new tools.

VV: Tell us about how The Tickle started.*

Originally, Maia Mellier and I thought, why don’t we make a zine? The technology, the motivation, and the ability to move quickly and connect to artists – it was all there. 

The very first issue started with creative writing in mind, and we featured 3 artists that we liked. We published it as an NFT for a minimal price of 0.5 tez so everyone can afford it. We started doing subscriptions too. It started as 12 pages and I think the last issue was about 50. But you don’t have to buy the magazine to read it. You can just read it. That will continue forever, I can guarantee that.

In the early days, Theo Horsmeier came on board, and eventually we brought on Joanne Rush as a literary consultant. She was instrumental in launching The Tickle Lit and transforming everything to a higher quality. Now, monochromatikal, who is a design layout genius, does the design of the zine every week. 

The mission of The Tickle is to provide context to these fantastic artworks and artists in the very fast-moving twitter + NFT space. In a way, we have an ongoing curatorial board. Each featured artist recommends 5 other artists every week, and they are often people that we’ve never heard of. It’s really important that we do it that way. We concentrate on being diverse in our selection. We aren’t perfect, but we do our best.

I’m really proud of the consistency. We’ve had a Twitter Space for every single issue for 52 weeks. It could easily be put off, but it’s not. We made sure that didn’t happen. 

The Tickle is cheap, it’s free, it’s available, it’s for the community. 

(author’s note: as of July 1, 2022, The Tickle is one year old!)

VV: Why do you use Tezos?

JDM: The Tezos blockchain is a profound part of the web3 landscape in the sense that it’s truly an international community effort. This is enabled by the low cost and low barriers to entry. If you are anywhere other than in Western Europe and America, Ethereum is not practical. The gas fees for minting artwork are a month’s wages in some places. If you’ve got this new paradigm of culture exclusively populated by white American men, that’s a disaster for culture.

Tezos is open to all and affordable. I may sound like a bit of a socialist here but it’s not that – it’s about access. Access for all is important. You get talent from everywhere: from an Inuit village in northern Japan, to an island in the Philippines, or a rural town in Turkey – there’s talent everywhere in terms of the arts.

Tezos is the only place in the history of culture where everyone and anyone can get involved and be prominently known and featured in a short amount of time. It’s fantastic.

VV: If there was one thing in the NFT space that you could change or see done in a different way, what would it be?

JDM: As a community, we aren’t doing as well as we could to attract people outside the space. For us in the space, it’s second nature, but from the outside, it’s this complicated mess of scams and plummeting value.

There’s a lot to change, but the NFT space has evolved so profoundly and effectively in just the last year that all I can see in the future are positives. We’re still in early days. It’s like the dirty little punk clubs where the Sex Pistols were playing – we’re at CBGB where the Ramones are playing their first gig. We’ll look back on this in the next two or three years and we’ll see this stage as formative. In 20 to 30 years, people will see this moment as a huge cultural shift. It will get a lot bigger, but we need to be patient and also make efforts to encourage other people to join.

One of the founding ideas with The Tickle was to attract people outside of crypto. I’m trying to push it to be this web2-friendly thing so that people can see the content, the artists, and the writing in the space without necessarily opening a wallet. 

VV: Where do you see the space going? 

JDM: I think it’s possible, even probable, that we will raise poetry and the written word in general to a higher level of cultural appreciation. If you were in the 1950s or 1960s, poets were famous – everyone knew Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes. But as culture expanded and changed in the decades towards the end of the 20th century, poetry got pushed out toward the edges and couldn’t find a way into the mainstream as easily. It’s quite niche compared to what it used to be.

About a year ago when we started, I didn’t know many poets who were doing NFTs and I worried if we would have enough poets to fill the pages. It turns out that was not a worry at all. There are so many quality writers that it was impossible to fit them all in. In fact, we released a new quarterly literary-only journal in June 2022 called The Tickle Lit to do just that. 

In the future, if you can walk down the street and say to a stranger, “Name me a poet,” and they say, “Merchant Coppola” or “Sasha Stiles” that would be superb. I think we can get there. The art of creative poetic writing is coming back. These initiatives, The Tickle, theVERSEverse, and all the individual poets and writers out there improve the conditions for creatives.

VV: What would you say to people entering the space? Tips or guidance?

JDM: Everyone I know who is doing anything creative, I tell them to come join! Go use Tezos! The sense of community here is really powerful. It’s truly global and it goes across all metrics of accessibility. It’s life changing. Not in the financial sense: I’ve not gotten rich, and most people don’t. I’ve got a lot more culturally rich and creatively empowered, that’s way more important than the money you can make.

written by Elisabeth Sweet, Community Manager at theVERSEverse. Follow her on Twitter @speciesofvalue

*this section was updated on June 30, 2022

For more information about Denise’s prior poetry publications and fellowship awards, click here.

VV: As a well-established poet, how did you get into crypto/NFTs? 

DD: Through theVERSEverse founder Ana Caballero! Ana is a student of mine at Florida International University. She wrote to me about theVERSEverse and she sent me some examples and I thought, this is amazing. Because for years, I’ve always been a big proponent of collaboration. I’ve worked a lot with visual artists in the past on physical things like broadsides, artist books, text to go with paintings, etc. So, once I understood what crypto poetry was, I was down with it right away.

VV: Much of your work featured on the VERSEverse is collaborative. You’ve worked with Vanessa Coleman, Marlon Portales, Nathaniel Stern, to name a few. Could you tell us about your experience collaborating with visual artists in the NFT space? What is new or different about collaboration in poetry NFTs?

DD: What I love so much is the synergy that happens without meeting or even speaking to each other.

For example, Marlon Portales and I collaborated on “Independence Day (Hospice)”. The poem is about my own mother who passed last summer. In Martin’s rendering, he uses his mother as a real model. It’s her. My mother was a lot older when she passed, so then I see this younger breast, a woman with long hair, and learn it’s his own mother – it gave me the chills. I believe the “Confessional” poem is also his mom’s own hand.

It’s a universal thing: we’re all afraid of losing our mother. The mother is your first home. I mean, you were actually in there. Luckily, his mom is very much still alive and posing for his drawings and is a big supporter of his art, but [his interpretation] captures the idea that we are all afraid of losing people we love. These connections are really special.

For another poem called “Capitalism”, I was paired with artist Nathanial Stern, who happens to be a poet himself on theVERSEverse. Capitalism is a poem I wrote about women, body image, and this idea of perfection that women seem to have to deal with all the time.

As a feminist writer, I found it really fascinating that Nathaniel used a line drawing of a “regular” woman’s body, whereas in the artwork for “Sex”, which was by Marlon Portales, Marlon used a more idealized form of a woman’s body. It’s fascinating to think about who is going to interpret which poems in what way. I wonder if these poems were reversed, how would Marlon do the “Capitalism” poem and how would Nathaniel do the “Sex” poem?

We see the way poems are not fixed in time to mean one single thing to everybody – so much is interpretation.

VV: Who or what has been your biggest inspiration in poetry NFTs?

DD: I was so excited to see Christian Bök on theVERSEverse. His poem “Translating, Translating, Apollinaire” is just fascinating. Guillaume Apollinaire is a famous French poet who did these shape poems. I teach about them all the time in my classes. What Christian did with shapes in this one – my mind – I just – I can’t even. As creative as I think I am, I could never do that

That is what is really fascinating about the crypto poets: their work comes even more alive [with NFTs]. Even for me, as a more narrative thinker, I want to say that I understand Christian’s poetry better in the crypto. It brings it to life, literally: it starts moving around and you get this sense of the continuity of his giant imagination.

VV: Tell us more about what inspired some of your other poetry NFTs.

DD: “Another Summer of Love”*  is illustrated by Natalie Larrodé, and what makes it so interesting to me is that she focused not on the fact my mother stopped wearing a bra or even the hippieness, but instead on the flower. I just started crying when I saw this interpretation. It’s just beautiful. It could be a flower on the grave or a continuation of life. It’s almost like bringing someone back to life in a weird way. I thought that was a really smart interpretation.

Vanessa Coleman illustrated the two cruise haikus, “Belly Contest” and “Botox Demonstration”. They were basically found poems. I took my mother on a cruise for her 80th birthday and they really advertised: “Upper pool, man with the biggest, hairiest stomach flab wins!” and I thought that cannot be true, but it was! At the same time, women could get free Botox needles. So basically, the message was, men, you go be fat and belly flop and get a prize, and women you can go get Botox. It’s horrible! Vanessa did a great job with the lion and its marble globe and the big drink in “Belly Contest”, and then a classically beautiful woman statue in “Botox Demonstration”. She really got it.

VV: What things have you enjoyed about creating in the NFT space so far?

DD: What I’ve really enjoyed is the opening up of the idea that poetry can be considered a collectible. Poets write a poem and it’s kind of ephemeral; you write a book and you don’t really know who bought the book, it’s just kind of out there in the world. But this creates a community who can say “Hey, I bought this thing!”

Also, the fact that one person owns a piece of poetry, but the website is up for everyone to enjoy. You don’t have to buy it to enjoy it. It’s not like in the art world, which can be so snobby and exclusive and just for the rich. As long as you have an internet connection or a phone, you can look at all of these poems.

I’ve also enjoyed the styles of poet here! Like Christian Bök, who is very experimental, is a very different poet than Julie Marie Wade, who is a very narrative poet. One of my favorite poets, David Hernandez, who is a visual artist himself, he’s here too. It’s great to have these different voices.

One more thing I’ve noticed about art and NFTs – I have some amazing broadsides on really delicate paper, and I need to be so careful with them. Whereas poetry NFTs kind of exist in a place where you don’t have to be careful. They’re not going to break.

*”Another Summer of Love” is curated in CADAF Digital Art Month along with other theVERSEverse poets. Check it out!

written by Elisabeth Sweet, Community Manager at theVERSEverse. Follow her on Twitter @speciesofvalue