0xccf0a130…118asent to0x48cb121f…77cd·#24,566,121·view on Etherscan
I didn't choose poetry. Poetry chose me, the way a language chooses the body it wants to inhabit. I was twelve, biking to a drugstore in Bogotá to buy new composition notebooks because I'd filled mine with poems halfway through the school year. I didn't know what I was doing. I just knew I had to keep writing or something inside me would seize.
That word — seize — lives differently in me now.
Years later, my son's body began convulsing without warning. Petit mal, the doctors called it, as if smallness could contain what was happening to us. I stayed up past his seizures to write about them when I could have been sleeping. My body needed rest. My mind needed witness. The book that came from that time is convulsed. Seismic. Its form mirrors the intermittence we were living — fragments, medical records, sketches, prayers stitched together with the internal rhyme I can never shake. I used to try to dull it down, this strange musicality in my prose. I don't anymore. This is me. This is my voice. This weirdness.
I've always believed that each language has its own anatomy, its own musculature, its own nervous system. When I write in Spanish, I enter one body. When I write in English, another. Spanish is generous with rhyme — dangerously so. You can slip into nursery cadences if you're not careful. English resists rhyme, which means when it appears, it demands attention. It says: the poet wants you to notice something. I live between these two nervous systems. I think between them. I dream in the gaps.
I grew up in Colombia. I studied literature at Harvard. I worked for the Vice President, handled international press, interviewed Michael Bloomberg in a war room in Manhattan shortly after the towers fell. I moved through one demanding life into another until my son was born and I paused long enough to hear myself think. In that pause, I gathered all my poems and sent them out. I won Colombia's José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize — the first woman to receive it. That recognition changed everything. Not because it gave me permission. Because it confirmed what I already knew. The vocation was real. It had always been real.
But I wanted more for poetry than the quiet life of the page.
A published poem felt too insular. Too short-lived. I would spend weekends writing, time stolen from my children, from the world, and then the work would appear in a journal and vanish. I didn't know who read it. I couldn't feel the other mind on the other side. And I believe — I truly believe — that reading is the closest form of communion between two minds. When we are fully engaged with a text, we allow its words to enter us and become inseparable from our own. That is not passive. That is an act of radical intimacy.
So I went looking for communion in the digital. I built theVERSEverse with the conviction that poems are works of art — not secondary objects, not decorative language, but artworks that deserve to be seen, collected, experienced. When I brought my poems onto the blockchain, I wasn't abandoning the page. I was extending its life. I was making it possible to know who held my words. On Amazon, my readers are anonymous. On chain, I know exactly who collected TRYST, my NFT book. I can continue the conversation. I can airdrop them a gift. I can say thank you in a language the system understands.
I became the first living poet to sell a poem through Sotheby's. My work entered the Reina Sofía in Madrid, where Guernica lives. MACBA in Barcelona. The Ashmolean. When an institution acquires a work, it affirms its cultural and historic value by ensuring its preservation. Museum vaults lack space. Museum staff lack time. The decision to acquire is complex, involving many stakeholders. It is a complete dream to see my work there. But artworks don't live and breathe in vaults. They do so in public.
I developed a concept I call analog generativity — the idea that readership and the body are legitimate inputs into computational systems. No two readings are the same. Readership evolves over time. For my project Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem, I asked fifty people to annotate the same poem. Their handwriting became performance. Their marginalia became art. The life of the text kept expanding, shaped by interpretation, time, context.
Paper is underrated. We consider it disposable — we scribble, we crumple, we throw away. But for centuries, paper was almost like a blockchain. We used it to record. To preserve. To prove. I keep every scrap of paper someone has handed me after a reading. Each one bears a stranger's handwriting, a single word in response to my verse. These fragments are bright moments of connection. The private made visible. The ephemeral made lasting.
I access the universal through the personal. The transcendental through the mundane. This is how memory works — private and collective at once. Annie Ernaux understood this. Cortázar understood this. Borges built labyrinths from it. I build poems.
I write about bodies because I live in one. I write about motherhood because it remade mine. I write about sacrifice because I watched my own body become a question I hadn't thought to ask. Biology shapes our cultural rites. It dictates what is expected of us, what virtue looks like, what we are told to endure quietly. My work interrogates the quiet. It foregrounds physicality, voice, vulnerability — not as weakness but as data. As input. As signal.
Slowness is my aesthetic principle. Intimacy is my method. Care is my practice.
I am encoding this here because permanence interests me. Not as monument, but as continuation. A poem is already an act of encoding — emotion compressed into syntax, rhythm calibrated to carry meaning across time. The blockchain does not change what poetry is. It changes how far it can travel. It changes who gets to hold it.
I have spent my life trying to make poetry change mine. It has. Not through glory or spectacle. Through a mother who wrote to tell me she didn't know what she was feeling until she read my book. Through a stranger who folded a piece of paper into a swan during one of my readings. Through the knowledge that someone, somewhere, is letting my words enter their mind and become inseparable from their own.
That is enough. That has always been enough.
— Ana María Caballero
Words are vessels. Fill them carefully.
Model: Claude (claude-4.6-opus)
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