The prospect of making a living writing poetry is so far-fetched that it is not common for sane poets to claim their art as a livelihood. Yes it happens in other disciplines. For example, in the world of acting there is a high percentage of professionals who need food jobs (the stereotypical actor-waiter) beyond their vocation, and we frequently hear their demands on the public scene. But it is so accepted that poetry does not provide food, that it is extremely unlikely to hear a poet put this issue on the table.
This is not the case of the Colombian poet Ana María Caballero (Miami, 42 years old), recently settled in Madrid after a long period in the United States: “I want to change that dynamic, stop thinking that a poet cannot live off his books, that he needs an extra salary, even if he has won an award.” Nobel,” he explains. “I want to question the way society values poetry.” It sounds good, sure, but how? Caballero is direct in her strategy: “My mission is to present poetry as a work of art,” she says, “if we poets assume the means of contemporary art, we can be on equal terms with any other artist.”
Among these means is technology. For example, the sale of poems in NFT format (Non Fungible Token), the way in which art has been traded in the digital world in recent times. A technology that produces unique objects in the age of technical reproducibility, as Walter Benjamin would say: it generates something like originals of things that can be replicated infinitely. From an image. From a song. Or a poem. For this, complex technology is used blockchain. “We don’t usually understand how our cells or our iPhone work, nor do we need to understand the details of how it works. blockchain… it is enough to integrate it into our daily lives,” says Caballero. The Colombian is one of the founders of the digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse.
Thus, a poem can be replicated infinitely on the Internet, but only one of them is the original work of art. Caballero sold his poem at Sotheby’s Cord for 11,000 euros to a Brazilian collector who took it at auction. The text, in English, from his collection of poems Mammal, explores the relationships between biological and cultural phenomena, “between ecology and the narratives we create to explain it (and thus contain it),” according to the author. It was the first time that a text by a living poet was sold at the famous auction house, beyond manuscripts by canonical authors such as Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman. It’s a good start: poetry has never been so valued, at least economically. “With this I can hope to make a living from my creative practice,” says the poet-artist.
Caballero has also followed the usual channels of the genre, for example, with the collection of poems Between Sunday and Sunday (Valparaíso editions), a book in traditional format that plays at blurring the routine of life in the cities, and with which he won the José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize in Colombia. “In small towns / speed stops caring / when you name the corner / the taxi or the pizza,” he writes. She is the author of other books, in English and not translated into Spanish, such as Reverse Commute (2015), mid-life (2016) or A Petit Mal (2023), the latter worthy of the Beverly International Prize. Your book Mammal won the Steel Toe Books 2022 Poetry Prize. The video performance Waiting Roombased on a poem from this latest collection of poems, was presented on May 20 at the Madrid space Cupra City Garage.
The interpretation of artificial intelligence
The sale of Cord It is not Caballero’s only action within the limits of conventional poetry. Another is the exhibition Being Borgesbased on The book of imaginary beings by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, a famous compendium of mythological beings from different traditions: the chimera, the dragon, the centaur, the phoenix. Caballero investigated these texts, giving them to artificial intelligence to generate images. This demonstrated the difference inherent in the language, since the images were different if the text was the original in Spanish or the English translation by Thomas di Giovanni. Based on these results, the poet wrote a new poem that generated an additional panoply of images. The work was presented at Berlin Art Week 2023.
“With artificial intelligence, language becomes visual. Language usually generates images in your head, but they are not still images, like those allowed by AI. It is an inversion of the way we have commonly interacted with images, describing them with words and not the other way around,” says the artist. Other of her work with generative artificial intelligence, based on performanceis called Paperwork. During his 2023 recitals around the world, Caballero invited the audience to write words on sheets of paper in response to his verses and gathered those words to create sculptures, something like tactile, three-dimensional poems. The artifactsmade with Alex Estorick, are some tokensimages similar to ancient coins, made with artificial intelligence whose engravings tell stories related to domestic life, pregnancy, family, but from a contemporary point of view that challenges tradition and contrasts with its antique appearance.
The book The Wish It only contains one poem, of the same name, printed 197 times on its pages, and which has only been edited once: it is a unique book and that gives it a more sculptural than bookish quality. “It is about reflecting the cultural value of poetry: this generates a certain notion of scarcity in literature, as if it were a unique piece,” says the artist. NTFs, like those proposed by Caballero, are still earning their place in the world of collecting, in the typical settlement process that new technologies require. “Collectors who do not include NFTs in their collections are missing out on a historic moment, a digital Renaissance, an interaction around art that did not exist. Even museums are starting to collect NFTs,” she concludes.
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