Chitchat with a Creator: Ana María Caballero
Meet Ana María Caballero: an award-winning literary artist writing the web3 poetry revolution.
Introducing Ana María Caballero
Ana María Caballero is a first-generation Colombian-American poet and artist. Her work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She is the recipient of the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, and a Sevens Foundation Grant and has been a finalist for seven additional literary prizes. Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has been widely published and exhibited internationally, recently at bitforms in New York, Gazelli Art House and UNIT in London, Nighttimestory and Epoch Gallery in Los Angeles and L’Avant Galerie Vossen in Paris. She became the first artist to sell a poem at live auction in Spain, and her digital poems are held in both public and private collections, including the Museum of Nordic Digital Art, the Museum of Wild & Newfangled Art and the NFT Museum.
Recognized as a Web3 poetry pioneer, her work has been covered by major media outlets, such as Diario ABC, LAWeekly, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Elle UK and ARTNews. She’s been a speaker at events organized by the University of the Arts London, Sovereign Nature Institute, Untitled Art Fair, JustMAD, AWP, and the International Women of Blockchain Conference. She’s the author of five books and has a sixth volume forthcoming in 2024. As co-founder and curator at digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse, she’s transforming the way poetry is experienced, exhibited and transacted.
How did you hear about NFT and start your journey?
As soon as I read about Web3 in early 2021, I had the idea to create a digital poetry gallery where I could share my own work and the work of my poet friends. theVERSEverse’s name came to me in a supermarket parking lot, and I immediately bought it, feeling deep in my bones that it would work magic.
Having published poetry, fiction and nonfiction traditionally for nearly two decades, I felt that the life of a published poem was too short, too quiet, too insular. So I began turning my published work into spoken-word video poems that I shared on social media. The jump from Web2 from Web3 was a very natural one–and there’s not going back for me.
Ana Maria Caballero | Things We Are Saving to Write, MP4, 2023, bitforms gallery, New York
Could you tell us about your poetry?
My poetry is rooted in the deeply intimate details of my day. Our desires, regrets, quests for purpose are inseparable from the logistics of living. We rip envelopes, answer emails, towel children, boil eggs, all while pondering the ultimate meaning of our existence.
I tend to be very direct in my writing. When we over embellish what we’re feeling, it’s often because we’re afraid of feeling it. I believe that only brutally honest and personal writing can be relatable–much less universal. Language doesn’t need to adorn itself to be powerful or beautiful.
Much of my work explores how biology determines heteronormative societal rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood—particularly notions that package female sacrifice as virtue. My poems are moments of observation, but also rebellion.
I like to employ rhyme, which, in conversational texts, becomes a marked departure from our normal speech patterns and adds intention, play and subversion to a text.
Sometimes, I feel like a conceptual artist, drafting poems borne of ideas, of messages I want to communicate, putting my tools at the service of concept. Other times I feel like a landscape painter, making suggestions based on what I see.
I believe the act of reading is one of the closest forms of communion between two minds—that of author & reader. A mind deeply engaged with a text allows the language of the text to become its own. Thus, poetry’s power can extend beyond that of the aesthetic because words enter our mind to become indistinguishable from our thoughts, revealing emotions, ideas, beliefs we didn’t even know we shared.
My poems are heavily influenced by the works of poets such as T.S. Eliot, Louise Gluck, Lucille Clifton & Sharon Olds—authors with unmistakable poetic voices. Beyond the form & diction of a poem, whether it be page-based or digital, the soul of the poet must be palpable in order for the poem to speak the language of emotions.
Believing that few things are as intimate as the sound of our voice, my digital poems include a spoken-word component, combining poetic and physical voice to create a deeply immersive experience.
My spoken-word video poems fit within a long trajectory of text-based art, much of which could be considered performative, as the use of language implies an active rather than passive exchange with the work’s audience. From Ed Ruscha’s word paintings, to John Baldessari’s “Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell,” to Tracey Emin’s starkly straightforward neon signs, text in art overtly presents words as vessels of meaning. In doing so, such works touch upon the instability of language itself as a mechanism of storing and transmitting meaning. Words mean different things to each of us; meaning can evolve over time. Yet, it is precisely this vulnerability that draws me to words
I believe poems are works of art.
Ana Maria Caballero | Oración, MP4, 2023, Epoch Gallery, Los Angeles
Is there a story behind your profile picture?
My profile picture is taken from the cover of my first book mid-life. The cover artwork was created by a local Miami muralist named Adrián Avila, who also created the cover for my most recent book A Petit Mal. Both covers are canvas portraits of me painted by Adrian, then rendered digitally.
I worked very closely with Adrian on both covers, mapping out the concepts and visual narratives I wanted him to tell. I’d seen his murals of figures with bandaged eyes in the streets of Miami’s Wynwood area and was struck by their power.
I wanted Adrian to turn me into a blind poet for the cover of mid-life, a book that explores the grueling intersection of birth and death that occurs as we enter that stage in life when parents age and babies arrive. Suddenly, we find ourselves guarding both young and old, feeling drained as caregivers. This sense of vulnerability is present in Adrian’s image, but I also love that my face transmits strength and determination, capturing the wide spectrum of emotions that underpin our realities.
Tell us about a piece in your collection that is very special to you.
I love all the artwork I collect, though there is a special place in my heart for my literary NFTs. I’m proud to have works by poets and artists such as Julie Marie Wade x Layla Pizarro, encapsuled’s brilliant ArtBlocks drop, Elisabeth Sweet, Skye Nicholas, Christian Bök, Gisel Florez, Sarah Ridgley, Mieke Marple, Laurence Fuller, Breanna Faye, MS Bourland, to name a few.
I also recently collected an entire set of theVERSEverse’s Feral File exhibition, with works by artists Dina Chang, Diane Drubay, Connie Bakshi, Sasha Stiles, Gretta Louw, Solimán López, Nathaniel Stern, Julien Silvano, Nancy Baker Cahill, Alexandra Crouwers and Helena Sarin. I really believe the beauty of this collection will survive the test of time.
Could you share some advice for artists who are new to the crypto space?
I hold very dear the words that the immensely talented Colombian-American abstract artist Jimena Buena Vida once said to me: “Your art is your power.” To this day, this remains the best advice I’ve received in Web3.
For artists, it’s very important to find a tribe of kindred minds. I feel fortunate to have met Kalen Iwamoto very early on in my Web3 path and to have been invited into the wonderful CryptoWriters community she founded on Discord, where I learned so much. I was also lucky to find the crew from The Tickle, the pioneering Web3-native literary and arts journal founded by Maia Mellier and Johnny Dean Mann, where my poems were so thoughtfully and generously shared.
If you enter Web3 with a desire to learn and connect, to share your work thoughtfully with new audiences, armed with a message that is greater than yourself, you will grow as an artist and as a person. You might even find you’ve “made it.”
Ana Maria Caballero | Fathomless, MP4, 2022, Gazelli Art House, London
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