Like studying the root origins of a word, I like to trace the stem of NFT poetry backwards through the centuries. What would Emily Dickinson have minted if she lived in our contemporary world? Perhaps instead of locking her poems up in a trunk, we would’ve been treated to Dickinson Discords and more quatrain creations than we could even keep up with! This Little Poem, my first mint of 2023, looks back at one of my favorite poets, in order to celebrate the immense opportunities alive in poetry today. In a sense, we are just em dashes sliding through time.
Katie Dozier (KHD): “I write NFT poetry because every poem that flies out into the world encourages more to leave their nests. Poetry can change the course of humanity, and with the stakes so high we need fewer poems locked in the confines of minds and notebooks. We need poems hanging on walls (both digital and physical) to be lauded for their vulnerability and empathy. Poetry is art, and minting it as such on blockchains has the potential to bring poems into conversations yet unentered.” (web)
Lee Stern: “For years I have had the same nightmare, that I am standing in a line of people who have just been instructed to march off a cliff. So I wrote this poem, thinking the nightmare would go away. But it didn’t. In fact, the laugh track that carried it along got a little bit louder. And in the accompanying music, I found, the part for the bassoon was taken over by a drunken band of clarinets.”
Denise Duhamel: “As a child I memorized Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Land of Counterpane.’ I remember looking up ‘counterpane’ in the dictionary and was delighted to learn that it meant ‘bedspread.’ I suffered from asthma and could relate to Stevenson’s speaker, a bedridden kid. The poem in this issue also has a bedridden character—my mother, who passed away in July 2021.” (web)
Devon Balwit: “A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of rereading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which the news article quotes and from which this poem grows. In it, he writes that kitsch is ‘the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.’ (web)
Damaris Caballeros: “I like poetry because it allows me to express my emotions through a form of writing that has no rules or restrictions. I can reflect on my life experiences and put into paper what I feel like I can’t say to others.”
Playa El Zonte, a small town in El Salvador nicknamed “Bitcoin Beach,” became one of the first locales in the country to accept Bitcoin as a payment method, and inspired the country’s adoption of Bitcoin as a legal tender.
Maya Clubine: “My work is preoccupied with notions of place, land, and home. This poem reflects on the interface between developing communities and contemporary technologies such as electronic devices and cryptocurrency.” (web)
“What the Astrologer Failed to See in Our Stars” by Dick WestheimerPosted by Rattle
Image: “A Lonesome Border” by Carmella Dolmer. “What the Astrologer Failed to See in Our Stars” was written by Dick Westheimer for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, May 2023, and selected as an Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “The best ekphrastic poems leap into something new without losing touch with the original image, so that it’s often not immediately clear whether the poem or visual art was created first. Like a binary star, they appear as one. Dick Westheimer manages that with a poignant extended metaphor that doubles over itself several times. On its own, the poem is full of memorable lines, but the addition of the drawing makes for a brilliant singular object.”
