Last week, a poem by Ana Maria Caballero was sold at Sotheby's for 0.28 bitcoins, or $11,430. Caballero's poem “Cord” was auctioned online by Natively Digital for Bitcoin Ordinals.
The Native Digital Collection is designed as a deep dive into the world of NFT-like Ordinals on Bitcoin, and contains popular early articles. In addition to the text, the buyer of “The Wire” will receive a print of the poem's signature.
Michael Buhana, VP and head of digital art at Sotheby's, tweeted this week that “Chord” is the first individual poem to be sold at the 280-year-old auction house, excluding manuscripts and books.
The importance of the Sotheby's “Rope” auction was not lost on Caballero, who called it an opportunity to prove the inherent value of written poetry.
“Words and language and poetry are a wonderful opportunity to express their value. [their] My own,” Caballero told Decrypt after the sale. “Not with anything else, not with sight, not with sound, not with any other kind of experience. Only the language of the poem, the text, is sold.
“Rope” will be featured in Caballero's upcoming book Mammal. Other artists in the Natively Digital auction include FAR, XCPinata, Nullish, Rudxane, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Popoki, Shroomtoshi, Des Lucréce and Claudia Hart. An article from the “Quantum Cats” collection sold for more than $250,000.
“I contacted Michael Buhana from Sotheby's because he wanted to put together a sale for Ordinals. I thought the curatorial theme should be about archeology in blockchain,” FAR told Decrypt on Twitter. “So I thought it would be fun to do a poem, and I invited Anna.”
Caballero has won numerous awards for her writing, including the Beverly International and José Manuel Arango National Poetry Awards. Along with Kalen Iwamoto and Sasha Stiles, Caballero launched Digital Poetry and NFT Gallery in 2021.
In August, TheVerseverse teamed up with the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles to create an exhibit that paired Ginsberg's photography with AI-generated poetry. While “Muses & Self: Photographs by Allen Ginsberg” looks like a Beat Generation icon, the show drew mixed reviews from the poetry community.
Sotheby's tweeted: “Anna examines the impact of biology on society and cultural systems. “Her work reveals the reality behind romanticized motherhood, challenging the narrative of sacrifice as a virtue.”
As Caballero explains, “Rope” was written in a style of poetry called villanelle. A villanelle is a poem with 19 lines and five stanzas, each with a three-line stanza and a four-line stanza. A villanelle often uses two repeated rhymes and two lines.
“I love this lyric for poetry and poetry, especially since this is a poem about motherhood. It's about pregnancy, about body, about flexibility,” Caballero said. “So it makes more sense in a male-dominated space,” she said, adding that more than 40 bids were received for “Cord.”
Caballero said she chose to participate in the project using an age-old poetic form to “pay homage to the technically complex bitcoin chain that started it all.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward.
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