Ana Maria Caballero Spain

I am a literary artist, someone deeply committed to working with language in all its manifestations and modes of transmission, including books, spoken-word, video, handwriting, sound, code, paper, artificial intelligence, choreography.

Sometimes we consider verse to be immaterial, ephemeral, ethereal. But there is nothing more material than the songs, artworks, poems, memories that enter our minds as we wait in line for coffee, sit in traffic, boil eggs, towel children. Nothing is more material than what makes us tick.

As an artist, I seek to give voice to the subtle, silent layers that quiver beneath the surface of our outward-facing selves and translate these pulsations into works that build connection.

I’m also interested in how blockchain provenance can activate poetry by making it transactable. The word “transaction” is a good word. When we transact, we exchange, we share, we give, we receive, we assign value. When we send our mother a poem we love, we give this poem new life within our mother’s mind.

I believe that the power to record, transact and materialize poetry via the digital will prove revolutionary for poets.

I believe poems are works of art.

My poetry is rooted in the deeply personal details of my day and creates moments of observation and resistance. Much of my work explores how biology determines heteronormative societal rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood—particularly notions that package sacrifice as virtue.

Poetry stores culture itself—the Odyssey, Beowulf, the Bhagavad Gita, the Divine Comedy, the Shijing—all poems. Virgil was commissioned by Rome to write the Aeneid so as to define the essence of a tried and true Roman. He modeled his hero after Ulysses but bestowed upon Aeneas one new key trait—duty to country. Poetry told the Romans who they ought to be.

You can read a biography of Oscar Wilde and imagine what his years in jail must’ve been like, or you can read The Ballad of Reading Gaol and know what he felt. Poetry is knowledge of other, which translates into knowledge of self.

For many, poetry evokes tradition, while blockchain rings of the future. By engaging with technology, poets assert that verse, too, represents promise.

Why store facts for all eternity if those facts have no context, no story, no emotional agency?