Ana María Caballero Wants to See Poetry Not Just Vindicated But Revalued
The biggest downside to being an editor when you launched your career as a writer is that you still feel that bone-deep compulsion to write. The challenge, of course, is finding the time, which is why the below conversation with transdisciplinary artist and digital poetry pioneer Ana María Caballero took place many months ago, before she signed with Spain’s leading new media gallery, Max Estrella, and before MACBA in Barcelona and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid confirmed they’d be adding her work to their collections. Since we spoke, she was also named a finalist for the HOFA Gallery Digital Art Awards in the Innovation category, and more recently, a finalist in the Still Image Award category of the Lumen Prize for The Sylphs from her “Being Borges” series (marking her fifth Lumen Prize nomination). Earlier this month, her new manuscript was awarded Trio House Press’ Editors’ Selection in Poetry and, as she graciously informed me via email just today, her first novel has won Texas Review Press’ Clay Reynolds Novella Prize.
As you might infer, Caballero’s official bio is absolutely replete with well-deserved awards, grants and accolades. It’s also peppered with tech jargon (Bitcoin Ordinals, Web3, crypto art) that seem at first glance like a curious mismatch to the traditional wordsmithing that has seen her publish several books of poetry. But she is nothing if not exceedingly patient and ready to explain—in ways even your grandma could understand—just what she means when she talks about “placing poems on chain.” Poems, she tells me, “traditionally didn’t find their way into museums, galleries or art collectors’ homes,” and yet hers have found their way into all three in various forms.
Waiting Room, which debuted at Art Dubai in 2024, combined performance, spoken-word poetry, choreography, photography and blockchain provenance. Fifty Ways of Looking at a Poem, a durational work she describes as an “analog generative system,” was acquired by a major private collector and will be shown at the Francisco Carolinum in Linz. “Echo Graph,” her first solo show in Germany at OFFICE IMPORT gallery, stretches a single poem across mediums: film, stills, sculpture. Her next project—a new, choreographic video work called Pace that is an homage to Pipilotti Rist’s Ever is Over All—will debut, also with OFFICE IMPART, next month during Berlin Art Week.
“Her practice seeks to make poetry, the most ephemeral thing possible, more tangible,” Load gallery founder Alex Simorré told me not long after I spoke with Caballero. “She’s found numerous ways to do so—her verse turned into video, A.I.-generated paper sculptures, physical sculptures, book sculptures, and the list goes on.” Caballero’s artworks have even made their mark in the auction world. CORD was the first poem by a living poet sold in the history of Sotheby’s, but if you’re imagining something like a framed piece of paper, you’re still not thinking like Caballero. While the buyer did receive a signed print of the poem, what they actually bid on was a unit of Bitcoin inscribed with the poem—the aforementioned ‘ordinal.’
“Placing poems on chain feels natural,” she told me. “If I had started by putting my poems onto canvases, my work would have been just another painting in a sea of paintings.” Instead, she’s creating work that is so unique that it often requires not just an explanation but an education to truly understand the mechanics of it (not that that’s a bad thing). We spoke about the relationship between art and poetry, her relationship to technology and what it’s like to be doing pioneering work in otherwise well-trodden spaces.
I’ve been following your work online because you’re exploring a space where poetry meets fine art in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere. Do you consider yourself a poet first or an artist first, or is that distinction meaningless to you?
There is a semantic distinction. I trained as a poet—started writing in middle school, took creative-writing classes in high school, then studied literature at Harvard. My career has always revolved around language: investor newsletters, government writing—all sorts of professional projects. I never attended art school, but after publishing a few books in my thirties, I applied to an MFA program in South Florida. I asked to be a joint major in poetry and fine art because I wanted to evolve how I present my writing. The university couldn’t coordinate between the English and art departments—the fine art department didn’t even know who to call to ask about it—so I thought, fine, I’ll just be a poet, yet the urge to move beyond the page never left.
How did what you were doing change once social media and digital tools emerged?
When social media took off, I began turning published poems into simple animations. After a while, I realized that I was starting to create a feeling of community around my work and to connect with other poets in ways that I wouldn’t have in academia or by publishing in university journals. Learning about blockchain and digital provenance felt like a natural next step. I could place my poems—already digital files—onto platforms where they could be transacted, opening new creative and economic possibilities. And it really opened up a whole new way of creating because as I went deeper into these digital realms, I started envisioning how I could take analog poems and present them in different ways. I started teaching myself basic coding and learning to use A.I. tools to explore new modes of presentation.
So, technology inspired your visual turn rather than the other way around?
Exactly. I’ve published six books and know the traditional route, but poets often struggle with sustainability. I felt like there should be more for poets—things the MFA program and the independent presses couldn’t offer me. Eventually, I found it in online networks and blockchain, which have been explosive for my practice over the past three years, letting me imagine a poem as an exhibition rather than a journal submission.
Your name often appears in crypto and digital-art circles, which surprises people who think of poetry as strictly analog. What is it like to merge an ancient form with a futuristic art world?
Poetry is a tool that lets us communicate, store and transmit memories, emotions and experiences. It’s a way of keeping records. What we’re seeing now with the blockchain and digital provenance is an expansion of our ways of storing files—an explosion, really, of ways we can store files and record them indelibly into these decentralized networks. Digital provenance gives my work the capacity to sit at the same table where film, photography, sculpture and conceptual art sit. And painting, too. There’s always been a relationship between text and visual art, though historically, text in visual art leans on short, punchy phrases—Jenny Holzer-ish statements that you can read on a billboard while driving by and still get that punch in the gut. Not to discredit that, of course; the hardest poems to write are the shortest ones. But now I can exhibit a three-minute video poem with choreography and sound in a gallery setting where a page-bound poem might never appear.
My work now has the same capacity to be exhibited as a painting, yet poems traditionally didn’t find their way into museums, galleries or art collectors’ homes. That’s part of what makes it so exciting: it’s unexpected. What’s more, the subject matter of my work hasn’t changed. It remains visceral, rooted in embodied experience and the search for selfhood—topics that aren’t typically prioritized in the digital, NFT or crypto art spaces, where glitch aesthetics and Xcopy-style visuals tend to dominate. In contrast, my work often explores fluid, sometimes feminine themes like pregnancy, breastfeeding and menstruation, and I love seeing those narratives hold their own alongside more expected digital works. There’s a real pleasure in placing that kind of content in spaces where it hasn’t traditionally appeared.
Who is more likely to collect your work—traditional art world types or crypto collectors? What defines the people drawn to your work?
I think the collectors who gravitate toward my work are visionary. They recognize how significant this can be for poetry and for the literary arts more broadly. To them, it’s obvious: why isn’t poetry transacted? Why isn’t it sustainable for a poet to publish a book, even though we claim to value poems and see verse as culturally essential? At the heart of my work, beyond the themes it explores, is a desire to see poetry vindicated and revalued—not just applauded symbolically, but supported tangibly. These collectors, whether they deal in euros, dollars, bitcoin, ether or tezos, connect not only with the work itself but with the idea that poetry is art. And if we truly believe that, we need to honor the craft in ways that sustain the poet’s life and practice. In that sense, what’s happening here really does feel like a quiet revolution.
Tell me about the Sotheby’s sale a few months ago—I don’t think your contribution attracted enough attention, given how groundbreaking it was.
Yes, it’s the only poem by a living poet ever sold at Sotheby’s. Of course, folios by poets like Walt Whitman or manuscripts by Emily Dickinson have done well, but those are historical artifacts. When I looked through Sotheby’s listings, the only works by living writers were things like a complete set of Harry Potter first editions. Everything else—Ginsberg’s notebooks, for example—came from writers who are no longer with us. So this marked a first in the auction house’s history. They’ve long sold paintings, sculptures and other works by living artists, but never a poem by someone still alive.
What did the buyer actually receive?
The buyer acquired a text-only inscription of my poem about childbirth on the Bitcoin blockchain. The poem had been in a book and a literary journal but reached a far wider audience through the auction.
Do you consider yourself a pioneer in this space?
You’re never the only one—there’s always a before, an after and a during—but when it comes to traditional poetry, the kind written with pen on paper and published in journals or books, I haven’t seen many poets around me taking up this challenge. There’s a small but wonderful community of poets who are native to the blockchain, but the crossover from the traditional literary world into digital spaces is still rare. I understand why—it requires learning new technology, sometimes even basic coding, and the UX/UI of these platforms can be intimidating. But honestly, if I can do it, anyone can. It just comes down to wanting to try.
What’s the most unusual way you’ve presented a poem?
The Bitcoin inscription is still the most surprising: unformatted text etched onto the original chain, now also integrated into my one-of-a-kind book sculptures that invert the usual scarcity model.
Many people in the traditional art world still don’t fully grasp blockchain. How do you explain it to them?
There’s one thing I always say when I’m trying to explain how the blockchain works: Do you know how a telephone works? Or how your computer works—how we’re sitting here speaking face to face through a video camera, likely without any cables attached? Most of us don’t really understand the mechanics, yet we accept them as part of daily life. Your phone tells you when to turn left or right, and you trust it, even if you don’t know how it “knows.” We benefit from the technology without needing to understand every detail.
The blockchain is similar. You don’t need to grasp all its technical intricacies to engage with it. At its core, it’s a decentralized ledger—a record-keeping and file-storage system that doesn’t rely on a single server or central authority. Instead, it lives on thousands of distributed servers that record information in real time. You can add your own data—like a poem or a visual artwork—to this system, and that action is preserved across the entire network. If one server fails, others retain proof that, say, you inscribed a poem on a specific section of the Bitcoin blockchain. Your digital wallet keeps a record of that transaction, and you can transfer that record to someone else, much like selling a painting. It’s just a new way of doing something very old.
Have you noticed you’re seeing more appreciation for poetry since you began working this way?
I do think there’s been a growing interest in poetry—specifically, in what poetry can do once it moves beyond the page. Traditionally, the poetry world is extremely insular. It’s often poets reading other poets in the same literary journals. Chances are, the people reading your poem are the ones published on the page before or after you, and maybe the editor. That’s the extent of its reach. But now, people are starting to think, “Maybe I do like poetry. Maybe I just haven’t been reading the kind I connect with. Maybe there’s more out there—and maybe I even want to buy a poetry book.”
I presented at the Rosewood Hotel in Madrid as part of a conversation series hosted by Christie’s. The woman who organized it works with Christie’s Contemporary Art—not digital, not web3, just the standard Christie’s. She attended one of my talks, and I gave her a copy of my book. Later, she told me how much she loved it and asked if I’d do a public conversation. Afterward, several traditional collectors approached me, saying how compelling and logical it felt to engage with poetry this way. Seeing it presented in a different format made it click for them. They’re engaging with poetry now because it’s been reframed—and that, to me, feels like real progress.
To wrap up, I’d love to know who inspires you.
I admire Sophie Calle and Maria Lai for pushing the book and poem beyond the page, and I value Cole Sternberg’s text-based art. Poets like Louise Glück and the Colombian writer María Mercedes Carranza sustain me. In terms of who I collect, I’m in the trenches, and I really admire the work of fellow poets who are doing incredible things in the digital art space. I have peers—like Laurence Fuller—whose dedication to the craft and innovation in this medium I deeply admire.
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