Poetry is the
most exciting memecoin on
the ideas exchange.

Just a poem today. As I am preparing the move to another platform. I will make a snapshot of the subscribers here on Tuesday. If you are subscribed at that moment, you will start receiving from the new platform from next week.

Of course, just as here, you can subscribe or unsubscribe whenever you think the time is right. And no matter which platform you choose, poetry is our currency for exchanging ideas.

Poésie de la vie

Just an image for you, this time. From a platypus in the amazing Naturalis Museum in Leiden, The Netherlands. If you’re in the area, go there.

Poetry elsewhere

April is poetry writing month. A month to write a poem every day. To practice your writing skills, build a habit, strengthen your creative confidence or just to have some fun. is writing every day in April, because she’s capable:

Word Work

Capable

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2 years ago · 2 likes · Kim Nelson

Spring is a month filled with inspiration. New things jump to live. Like a year ago the Substack newsletter of did, celebrated with this poem:

26th Avenue Poet

What the Trees Sing in Springtime

Even a winter-rooted soul like myself succumbs to the enchantment of new leaves in springtime…

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2 years ago · 23 likes · 26 comments · 26thAvenuePoet

Sometimes all you need is a little poetry to forget about life for a while. Or get it thrown in your face. Somehow, the amazing poets at always do both. At once.

Poetry Trapper Keeper

Idk much about quantum entanglement but I do know the

Hi charming friends, Kelly’s poem from last week reminded me that…

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2 years ago · 8 likes · Poetry Trapper Keeper

Paper: Softcover Stone Paper Notebook by Paper on the Rocks
Pen: Edson by Waterman
Ink: Denneweg Groen by P.W. Akkerman

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PS: Thanks to from for the inspiration of this series.

Some baguette
and a round semolina
bread with yeast, as Berbers make it;
zaatar spiced melting pot -
our table.

What is your favorite type of bread? Is it one you grew up with, or one you discovered later? For me, it’s all of the above. Recently, we had some bread local to where we live (in France, so yes, baguette) and also a delicious semolina bread made by a local baker with Berber roots. I’ve been thinking about bread quite a lot lately, thanks to my friend Chris and his CoCreated community. He challenged us to talk about bread. And so I did, amongst other things through poetry.

I met Chris on Farcaster, a sufficiently decentralised social networking protocol, that is the playground of predominantly crypto-focused people. Crypto is not really the right term, but one that is most familiar to the people who are not in these circles. We ourselves like to call it Web3, the internet version that is decentralised, self-custodial, immutable and permissionless. The version of the internet as it should be. One where you don’t pay for access with your private data, and one where creators are not only valued, but paid.

Substack, where you find this newsletter at this moment, the platform that helps me send these messages to you, is a kind of in-between solution. You could call it part of the Web2.5 version of the internet. I like Substack. Maybe I even love it. It is home to so much amazing content. Just check out my recommendations to find a sliver of that.

However, I spent most of my time in Web3, and the challenge with that is that it keeps getting harder to go back in time. Back to Web2.5. So, I’ve made a decision to start moving my newsletter fully to Web3. For now, as I’m setting up the new home, you will keep receiving my newsletter as you were used to. But in the next few weeks, the change will be fully implemented, with an end goal of moving the newsletter and you, my amazing subscribers, to another platform.

Not much has to change for you. The transition will be as smooth as possible. I will keep you informed. And, if you are staying with me, you will at one point receive this newsletter from a different platform.

This is also a good time for you to reevaluate how valuable this newsletter is to you. I would love it if you stay subscribed and will move with me, but I will still love you if you choose that this is a great moment to get one newsletter less in your inbox.

The plan is to migrate in the second half of April.

PS: You can collect the poem as in the image above as a digital collectible.

Collect Bread pot as NFT

Poésie de la vie

Writing poetry every day helps you to make sense of the world, strengthen your writing skills, build up your creative confidence, have fun and so much more. In the spirit of the National Poetry Writing Month, which has already for many years actually been an interNAtional POetry WRIting MOnth (NaPoWriMo), I have shared a list of 30 word prompts with my Web3 community. One word for each day of this month I like to call the Onchain Poetry Writing Month (OnPoWriMo), for poetry published on blockchains. Whether you do that or not, whether you are a poet or not, I can highly recommend joining in. You can use the words in the list above. In whichever order you choose. Pick a word and write a poem with or inspired by that word. Can you guess what I did today?

Poetry elsewhere

One of my favorite poets has released new work this week. She is doing groundbreaking work, using an AI she has trained herself with her own words, and then working together to create poetry. Sasha Stiles is brilliant, and kind and showing how onchain poetry and the world of Web3 are bringing new opportunities. The prices for her unique artworks show that there’s a market for poetry and that she is breaking that wide open. All poets can benefit. From her new collection, you can start with The First Quarter.

The First Quarter by Sasha Stiles

There’s always a multitude of facets in all of us. The sacred and the profane, as calls it in his poem Sylvia Plath in Paris. It’s a celebration of humanity, of feeling empathy for all of us, even if we have been on opposing sides in history, or our people have been the victims of The Other. Well, I can’t write it as well as Sherman Alexie can. Enjoy his Sylvia Plath in Paris:

Sherman Alexie

Sylvia Plath in Paris

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2 years ago · 338 likes · 101 comments · Sherman Alexie

If you are looking for very creative poetry, that is available on a blockchain but can be acquired with dollars (or euros), look at this wonderful collection made by the poet known as OddWritings. It’s a collection of playing cards with poetry on them. Enjoy the Poetry Cards by Oddwritings:

Poetry Cards by OddWritings

When was the last time you opened your mailbox and found something else than brochures and advertising leaflets in it? Yes, I mean the mailbox at your door. That physical one.

For me, it was not that long ago. I received a card from Denver, signed by a group of my online friends. It was not the first one, and likely not the last.

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History
teaches us what to change
today, to make tomorrow better.
Not repeat mistakes, but
to evolve.

In the Jesuit cathedral of Cusco in Peru, there’s a beautiful Last Supper painting. What makes it so special, is not the depiction of Jesus and his friends. We have seen that painting before. The special thing about this painting is what is being served. One of the plates on the table is filled with… cuy. This is a dish that is certainly not something the people in the Levant would eat. It’s a local delicacy in Peru.

Whether you have been jumping over a fire shouting “Give me your beautiful red colour and take back my sickly pallor” or fasting and celebrating iftar, or going out for an egg hunt this weekend, spring is a wonderful moment to think about how we can learn from the past, so that we can make our future better. Rituals can easily turn into meaningless repetitions of what has been done before, but they also offer wonderful opportunities to stop and think about why we do what we do and how we can adapt to today, so we can create a better tomorrow.

Whatever you celebrate this time of year, I hope it brings you fresh energy.

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Poésie de la vie

Today, I have a song for you. Listen to the lyrics, and enjoy.

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Poetry Prompts 4 Kids

Poetry elsewhere

Some poetry is not to be read, but to be listened to. And this one by the poet known as Mari is certainly one to enjoy. One of the nice things I see in the wonderful world of Web3 is that we tend to reflect on ourselves with our tongue firmly in our cheeks. This is an example of that. Enjoy smooch the smoochers by pushing the button:

smooch the smoochers by Mari

Ibraheem Leone is certainly a poet who inspires us to think about where we are and where we want to be. His poems tend to carry a message of love. Not romantic love, but love for our fellow humans. In his Letter to Sudan, he shines a much-needed light on how we can see global events differently, and how many people can use our help.

Letter to Sundan by Ibraheem Leone

Maybe you have some days off, maybe the office is empty. But what happens when Everybody has gone home? The poet known as Drachetech11 explores this question and illustrates it with one of his beautiful photos.

Everybody has gone home by Drachetech11

Drivers, be careful.
First street to the right.
Passing children.
DANGER!

What do you think when you see this? Maybe you imagine a gang of very dangerous children throwing rocks at cars. Or maybe you are driving a bit more carefully because you know there are kids around the corner and you don’t want to hurt them.

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We're early
so we're the prospectors
roaming through a world of unfinished
business, trying to find
pearls for swine.

When you are early in an area of new trends or new technology, you will find yourself in a world where much doesn’t work too smoothly, and some of the things you love and get used to will vanish. The world of Web3 is, despite earlier hype cycles, currently in such a state. And I love being there. Feels a bit like roaming into the Wild West, establishing new lands. But this time, we treat the people much better. At least, many of us do.

Do you like to venture into new lands, or prefer more familiar and polished surroundings?

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Poésie de la vie

Tulip Mania is starting in The Netherlands again. Not the notorious bulb bubble of the 1630s, but the colourful beauty of flower-filled flat fields.

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Poetry elsewhere

Can you stay on your dreams if you would choose to do so? Or would you try to find your way home? The poem After the Snow Moon by is a wonderful exploration of this question. And much more. Enjoy:

a small spectacle

After the Snow Moon

After the Snow Moon First light is a petal- soft wash, forget-me-nots & birdseye speedwell blooms, the dog’s arctic- blue eyes, watching & waiting for me to slip back into the waking world. I l…

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2 years ago · 32 likes · 6 comments · MK CREEL

When you close the door behind you, or actually, just before you do, look back at the empty space, and think of the plants. With Everyone has gone home Drachetech11 has written a beautiful poem about an office plant. Enjoy it by pushing the button:

Everyone has gone home

In the end, I would love to become one with the sea. You know, after. But until then, I love to enjoy to the fullest precisely where I am. wrote and illustrated A Love Letter to Where I Live, a spectacular poem about loving where you are (and if you are like me, that does not have to be always the same place, but it can be), and then becoming one with the ocean. I love this poem, I hope you enjoy it:

Weirdo Poetry

A Love Letter to Where I Live

Hello, Friends! Instead of a haiku comic, I have a different kind of poetry comic. I think this is a love letter to the Willamette Valley, where I have lived for the past 25 years. Maybe it’s something else entirely. Weirdo Poetry is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber…

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2 years ago · 75 likes · 42 comments · Jason McBride

Why are you writing the poetry you write? What's your drive, what's your goal? And what's your vision? These are questions you should ask yourself as an artist regularly, but in the magical mundo of the metaverse, they are particularly important.

In the traditional world, you write a poem and submit it to a publisher, in the hope you can convince the editors your poem is a great fit for their magazine. Or book. Or site. They often don't say it this way, but what you are doing is submitting your art to their vision of what poetry should be. It has to align with their goals and their drive to publish. Fair enough, because building an audience for a magazine or book collection is hard work. And that audience trusts their judgement. They, the editors and publishers, are the gatekeepers standing between the audience and the artists. You could also call them matchmakers: they decide if your work matches the taste of their audience.

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Keep your own gate

In Web3, when you publish your art as NFTs, this is hugely different. Yes, there are some NFT magazines, combining multiple works in one NFT, sharing the earnings with the artists. But mostly, you need to find your own audience. Either for your entire body of work, or for individual pieces. To find that audience, those people who will press the mint or collect button on your work, you need to be able to tell them about your work. You need to be able to answer these questions above. You should create your own manifesto.

Publishing your work onchain is like self-publishing. You need to do all the work yourself, including defining how your work matches the desires of your audience. The good part is: you are not dependent on individual sales or collects alone. It's not just about that publication fee you get for finding your work in a magazine or the royalties of a book. It's about people collecting (an edition of) your work, and about finding patrons who want to support what you do. In Web3, this is a thing. There are, as I mentioned in the last post, several funding opportunities for artists. In many formats, but they all have in common that there's always a part where you have to present yourself. Having a manifesto ready to go, is a great way to ensure you are always prepared, and that you send out a consistent message. As I also mentioned in the previous entry of this travelogue: taking part in these public good funding rounds and competitions is not just about getting the funding or the prize, it's about finding new people to welcome into your audience. It's about finding new collectors.

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Let’s take the first step together

So, take these questions as a start, and write your own manifesto. It's a good step towards finding your audience.

• Who are you?

• Why are you writing the poetry you write?

• What's your goal?

• What's your vision on your work?

• Who is your audience?

The answers to these questions will help you shape your manifesto, your declaration of artistry, your statement of poetry. It's a process. And as you evolve, so will your statement. But that's the next phase.

You can find my Declaration of Poetry by clicking the button. Or on the other side of the paywall as an image, where you can also Ask Me Anything about being onchain.

Arjan's Declaration of Poetry

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It is a bit of a long game, but a nice one. And a very rewarding one. It also may not seem like a direct creative endeavour, but it certainly will tickle your mind as well as your hands.

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This dead wood
is teeming with life; once
lush branches sprouting leaves - habitat
of crawlers now, bottom
of foodchain.

Parks are inspiring this time of year. Even if only for the dead branches of trees being stacked in strategic places to form habitats for insects, fungi and invertebrates necessary for a healthy ecosystem and that important base of our food chain.

What else can I say?

Are you inspired by the changing season?

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Poésie de la vie

I’ve been talking about bread with some friends lately and was impressed by the enormous variety of bread we have in the world. This one looks very tasty.

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Poetry Prompts 4 Kids

Poetry elsewhere

Have you ever felt you had too much on your plate? Overwhelmed by the workload of all the tasks you’ve said yes to? Then this poem is a good reminder for you. In his signature play of rhythm and rhyme, shares a beautiful poem with an important message. Enjoy Genie!:

Hello Universe

GENIE!

Today’s poem is about finding magic in life. It is probably one of the longest I’ve written. I hope you like it! Alright, poem starts in 3… 2… 1…

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2 years ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · Punit Thakkar

The poem at the top of this post was inspired by a little bird searching for food in a pile of dead wood. Now, birds are wonderful sources of inspiration. Whether it’s a robin or a heron. Poet shows this in his poem Birdwatching, which gives you a lot to think about. Enjoy his poem here:

Poetry & Process

Bird watching

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2 years ago · 50 likes · 17 comments · Brian Funke

We’ve been reading Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls quite often in the last year. Great stories about great women. And although I am very happy to celebrate their intellect, creativity and courage, there are so many people that deserve to be celebrated as well, even though their actions may not have become part of the narrative of positive change. We can’t all be like Rosa Parks, set down for good, a beautiful sonnet by is very much about that. Celebrating more, without discounting the ones we already celebrate. Well, go enjoy this poem, and celebrate the poet who wrote it. He deserves it.

And Now, A Sonnet

We can’t all be like Rosa Parks, set down for good

A note for this, since the poem itself is awkward alone. Action is a state of being that is uncontrolled by the actor. Once you begin to act, the outcome is a force hard to rein in. I think for most of us, at least for me, that stops us from acting out, since we cannot control the consequence…

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2 years ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · James Maynard

Paper: Le tout, le Rien et la reste by Gallimard
Pen: Neo Slim Metal Black by Faber-Castell
Ink: Red Dragon by Diamine

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PS: Thanks to from for the inspiration of this series.

One of the things I like to achieve with my poetry is to find beauty in the ordinary. I firmly believe that if you look close enough, or from the right angle, and always with an open mind, you can find beauty in everything.

Today, in the weekly exercise of our creative muscles, we practice finding that beauty in the ordinary, by making a museum of everyday things.

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Pruned by snails
and birds and humans, the
flora in the park grows back more lush,
more colourful, more rich,
every year.

In our garden, and in the local park, plants and trees are exploding with colours at the moment. Some, like the daffodils and croci, just pop out of the ground, where their bulbs live unseen the rest of the year. In other cases, especially in the trees, we see the spring part of the yearly cycle return in ever-bigger-growing trees. The fruity trees in the park, but also our own young olive tree and the avocado trees that we grew out of the stones ourselves, are going through the yearly cycle, but are now bigger and stronger than last year. It’s reassuring in a way. There are sometimes setbacks, but in the end, we grow back stronger. Something like that.

At the very least, the beautiful blossoms are bringing liveliness to the world around us.

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Poésie de la vie

And the daffodils look lovely today. They really do, and they do always bring this song to my head. A song that always picks me up and brings me to a wonderful place. Sometimes, the poetry of life hides in enjoying the music.

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Unlock the inspired brains of kids and strengthen their creative confidence. A new series of poetry prompts for kids of all ages is here. Get inspired.

First prompt is all about rain

Poetry elsewhere

I love the imagery in this poem by from Tumbleweed Words. It’s filled with melancholy, but I just feel the beauty of a seaside town. Enjoy going home:

Tumbleweed Words

going home | poem

Well, I grew up in the eighties when the Tories broke the unions Miners stood at checkouts, filling bags with discount foods On a coastal walk to school, I began to notice dirty needles Where I used to count fishing boats, hallowed ocean views. - Locals walked dogs along the coast, I knew most of their names…

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2 years ago · 14 likes · 4 comments · David

You probably have heard of AI. And maybe you have an opinion on it. Of course, there’s the potential of it being abused to create images “in the style of…”. But that’s not the promising part of it. Nor the interesting part. Poet Leon Faesulis has been training his own AI language model. He lets it analyse his poems, then uses that analysis to generate a sentiment-based image with a generative art neural network. It’s on the cutting edge of creativity, and his poems are great, too. Enjoy this piece, Neuroverse #5, from his collection Neuroverse (pixelPoetica):

Enjoy nEuroverse #5 by Leon Faesulis

If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not making anything. We are trying hard to teach our kids that making mistakes is all part of the process, and that it’s okay to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them. And it is really true: if you don’t make mistakes, you make nothing. has a wonderful poem about precisely this. Enjoy Drafts:

"Do it! Push!"
I speak to myself, "push!"
"Add 10 percent distance to last run."
If I only just push.
"There: did it."

Running is my preferred way to get fitter. It’s just so easy to do: you put on a shirt, shorts and running shoes and head out. Especially when you live close to a park, like we do. But, it’s also something you, or I in this case, often do alone, by yourself. That means you will not be encouraged by your teammates. Nor will you have a coach or manager yelling at you. At least, not when, like me, you just run for yourself. I have two things that I rely on to keep going: my running playlist and my inner voice. I recently was able to reconstruct my favourite running playlist from 15 years ago. The main part, an album, was not available on any of the streaming services I use, until very recently. And now I have my running playlist back, and it does seem to help.

Oh, and I’ve enjoyed playing with AI to create short videos. Not the one by OpenAI, but this one is by Runway ML. I used it to generate this video:

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Poésie de la vie

Formula 1 is at the pinnacle of technology. And that challenges people. Not just all those engineers working hard on developing racing cars, but also other smart and creative people who want to do something special. Something that’s never been done before. Like piloting a drone behind an F1 race car driven by the reigning world champion around the legendary Silverstone race track. Watch the video. It’s inspirational.

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Unlock the inspired brains of kids and strengthen their creative confidence. A new series of poetry prompts for kids of all ages is here. Get inspired.

First prompt is all about rain

Poetry elsewhere

Words can be so magical. And some are untranslatable as they are not just part of a language, but deeply ingrained in the culture that uses that language. Now, home is an intriguing and fluid concept for me. Home, to me, is where I am with my significant other and our kids. But to many, home is that place where people feel they are from. Where their roots are. And some feel a deep longing for that home. In Welsh, there’s a word for that, hiraeth. This poem, Moving Home by , explores that word in a beautiful way. Enjoy:

The Pony Express

Moving Home

Hello all, Today I woke up to my 100th subscriber, and I just wanted to write a short note saying thank you to everyone! I’ve enjoyed making this substack, and I hope you all have enjoyed the poems! Now for a new poem…

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2 years ago · 11 likes · 4 comments · Samuel Quinn

Poet Emanuel Souza creates magical worlds with his words, and he likes to experiment. In his new collection, his words explore the twilight zone between poetry and technology, with Dalíesque illustration as the backdrop. It’s hard to pick one of the new poems, but you can start with Unfinished.

Enjoy Unfinished by Emanuel Souza

Music is emotion. And with that, music is also very inspiring, and the poet known as wordstobemusic shows that. Her newsletter is filled with music and poetry. The latest issue of her newsletter even has a playlist to accompany the reading. In it, you can find the poem ||quest of blue||, which is a joy to read.

Enjoy ||quest of blue||

Four years ago this month, I published an article calling all poets to try a new poetic form. A form I had created. Many did, and I have since written many a poem in this form. I called it the tritriplicata because it has 3x3x3(27)  syllables in it. I know, the name is not easy, but I didn't find something better, yet.

I created this form out of a small frustration with haiku. I really liked the syllable restrictions that form offered, but sometimes the nature reference was not completely what I was looking for. And then there are the self-proclaimed haiku experts who always find a way to tell you how your poem is not a real haiku and you should not call it that. So, I made my own form. My rules, of which one is that you can bend them to your will if you think that makes your poem better.

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Sing a song
for me Frans. I'd love that.
Leave your current politics out though,
and find middle ground in
The Land Of.

This time, on my way to Paris, I decided to go old-school. I charged my iPod Classic, stuck in it my jacket pocket, white earphones plugged in and pressed play on my old favourites playlist. It worked perfectly, just as I had used it always on my daily commutes 15 years ago. In Paris. Song after song brought me joy. Even the one by that artist, who got lost down a rabbit hole during the Corona pandemic. He was completely lost in a web of conspiracies, and talked about it in his popular podcast, spreading questionable theories. So questionable, that, as it happens these days, he got cancelled. It would have been easy for me to press that skip-to-next-song button on the click wheel. But I didn’t. Art, poetry, and more precisely my poetry, is, I firmly believe, a wonderful tool for us humans to share our visions of and for the world with others. Not to force them on others, but to show our way of seeing things. Art, poetry, and more precisely my poetry, should build bridges, not drive people further apart. I don’t cancel. I might not agree, but I rather find the things that connect us and focus on that. Or simply listen to what you think, and tell you what I think. The beauty of humanity is that we can disagree. Cancelling others, dehumanising others, it only makes the challenges in our world harder to overcome. So, despite his lostness, I still listened to Frans. Not to the song that asks him to sing a song. That one didn’t exist yet in the time of the iPod classic. But to the song about his country, his land, my land. Sing me a song, Frans.

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Poésie de la vie

We recently visited a butterfly garden, and one as big as a hand landed on my daughter’s head. Find the poetry of butterflies in this beautifully shot video.

Poetry elsewhere

Some poets know how to take you by the hand and transport you to a different place in time and space. I’m always transported by the words of , to a place that I really enjoy being. And sometimes to a person as well. In this case, a traveller reading a map on a hike. Enjoy The Tao of Maps:

Conspiracy to Commit Poetry

The Tao of Maps

Start writing today. Use the button below to create your Substack and connect your publication with Conspiracy to Commit Poetry The Tao of Maps Walking from Georgia to Maine, I study maps to find my way. The maps add weight to my pack and some other hikers think I am foolish to carry them. They are correct, in a way. There are painted white blazes on tree…

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2 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Joe Triton Schmidt

Translation is difficult. Maybe especially the translation of poetry. I learned from this poem that in Italy they say ‘to translate is to betray’. If you combine that with dadaist-inspired absurdist poetry, you can come to an amazing work. Poets Andrea Paoli and Kalen Iwamoto, together with Julien Silvano created this wonderful piece of art, where an original Italian poem by Andrea is homophonically translated by Kalen and underscored by Julien. Take your time to explore and enjoy [Re]belle infidele.

Enjoy [Re]belle infidele

What comes after this life? We won’t really know until we get there. But we can imagine it. And we can keep the memory of our friends alive by remembering them. This beautiful poem To Eternity by is an exploration of what comes after, and by using the form that he did, he honours a poet who not so long ago went to find out what comes after this life. It’s a great way to keep our memory of him, for lack of a better word, alive. Enjoy To Eternity, by Bob Metivier:

A Poet's Journey

To Eternity

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2 years ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · Bob Metivier

What is your work worth? If you decide to self-publish, this is a question you need to ask yourself. Also if you do that self-publishing onchain by minting your poetry (or other art) as NFT. What is your work worth, or, in other words: what is the price tag I should put on my art? If you self-publish a book on, for example, Amazon, this is an important question to ask. And a difficult one. On the one hand there is the complicated question of how much value you want to assign to your labour, talent, time and, you. On the other hand: what is 'the market' willing to pay. Publishing houses have marketing departments for this, and have a great understanding of this balance. But it's a lot of work, if you have to do it yourself.

Minting your poetry as an NFT, however, gives you not just many price-point options, but also many ways to experiment and find the price that's right for you. And as Web3 is an evolving landscape, more and more options are added regularly. In this post, we explore some of the options to find out what your work is worth.

Fine art onchain

Have you ever walked into an art gallery to look at poetry? I have, and it was a very intriguing experience. Also because all the pieces could be purchased as NFTs, which would give you the digital and the physical version. There were amazing pieces on display, and the price tags were a reflection of the category of fine art. To acquire a piece, you would have to spend hundreds, and is some case thousands, of Tezos, which had a near-equivalence to the Euro at the time. Exceptional? Not really. This year, Sasha Stiles sold a poem at auction with Gucci for thousands of Euro worth of Ether, and Ana Maria Caballero sold a poem inscribed on a Bitcoin for even more.

So, it happens. But in all honesty: poets like Sasha and Ana are the top of the pyramid. Their work is recognised as being of the fine art category by experts, museums, collectors and... other poets. But, this is not the norm for most of us. If you have a history in fine art, and have an existing collector's base that is willing to move with you onchain, you might be able to enter this part of the market. If not, it will be hard work.

This top of the pyramid is the domain of those who mint their NFTs on Ethereum Mainnet and maybe Bitcoin. Exceptionally, pieces of this caliber can be found on Tezos and Solana.

Treasures in the sand

Let's go from the top, all the way down to the bottom. Don't get me wrong: treasures are hiding buried in the sands. This is the place where you can collect an edition of a beautiful piece for the cost of about 3 sips of your latte. Or a 1/1 work for the price of a Bic Mac Menu. Not even the large version. This is where most of us stepped in, and where many of us stayed. This is where I play. Not only because I'm a bottom-of-the-pyramid kind of guy, but also because I believe that art should be available to everybody. Or, to be more precise: because I want collecting my art to be attainable to everybody. There are challenges, here, though. And we were hit hard by them in the last 2 years when the market for onchain art was on life support. The struggle is on one hand a catch-22: if you become known for low-priced art, people find it hard to move upward on the pyramid. It does happen, but that, too, is hard work. The other part of the struggle is that you need to move a lot of pieces to earn an income.

Airmiles for minters

On the upside, the communities around the different platforms for this are quite strong. People tend to promote the work of their friends, seek collaborations to both grow and so on. It's one of the reasons I started the Onchain Poetry Digest, listing new onchain poetry every two weeks. These communities can be a bit siloed, but that's more a semi-natural process than a drive for exclusivity. You will be welcome in most places.

This part of the pyramid mostly lives on Tezos, and increasingly on Ethereum L2s such as Base and Zora, but also on Polygon. The key factor here is the very low gas prices for transactions. Tezos has a strong community, that has been building for a long time, since before the previous top in the crypto cycle.

On the Ethereum L2 side, Zora has made a groundbreaking move last year, by introducing their protocol rewards, which you could call the Airmiles for minters. If you collect a Zora NFT, you have to pay a transaction fee of 0.000777 ETH (~ € 1.80). From this fee, if the mint is free other that the fee, Zora will give 0.000333 to the creator of the piece. I have heard of artists who are paying their rent from this income. You still need to work hard for that, but this may very well be your market.

Not only collectors

On top of low prices and protocol rewards, especially around Ethereum L2s there's a lot of Public Good funding going on, part of which is dedicated to the arts. Retroactive funding rounds, matched funding rounds and competitions, are all interesting opportunities for artists in this part of the pyramid. Maybe you have little chance to win the grand prize, but don't let that hold you back. First of all, some of these funding  opportunities are not structured as competition. I participated in a match fund round, in which eligible people could vote for your project by donating ETH to it. The organisers divided the fund at the end in the ratio of the amounts already received. So, everybody is a winner in that one. Even the rounds that are structured like a competition with one, two or three winners are interesting to participate in: you are putting your work in front of people who have an interest in doing good with their ETH, including supporting the arts. So even if you don't win, you might find some new collectors.

Finally, and this is especially true for platforms such as the (sufficiently decentralised) social network protocol Farcaster, and to a degree for Web3 newsletter platform Paragraph, there is the micro-payments income stream, AKA the tip jar. If you have a newsletter on Paragraph or an account on Lens, people can support you by collecting an issue of your newsletter, or a post on Lens. On Farcaster, you can use the native token (which has no direct monetary value, but with which you can pay for your yearly fees) to tip creators. Or you can use $DEGEN, which at the time I am writing this give every user on the platform a daily allowance to tip people who create great content. Paragraph has a collect button. Sure, there are already micropayments available in Web2. I have a tip jar on Buy Me a Coffee. But with all love for these: how many steps does it take to buy someone a coffee? Compare that to replying to a message on Farcaster with the text 1000 $DEGEN to tips somebody what is roughly € 2.5. Or click a 'like' button that sends 10 Warps to a caster. Tipping has become much easier, and that shows.

Finding middle ground

Now that we have looked at the top and the bottom of the pyramid, we can have a short look at the middle part, too. As a rule of thumb, these are the pieces you can collect between 0.1 and 0.5 ETH, or the equivalent thereof. I find this a complex part of the pyramid, because it's on the edge of mass-market and fine art. Where I must emphasize that these terms are only used to compare it to the traditional art world. From where I stand, all onchain poetry is fine art.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the middle of the pyramid. Most of the pieces here are 1-of-1s (1/1). So, unique pieces. Sometimes there are limited editions, too. But with low supply. This is very much the territory of artists who were here during the last bull market. There were many collectors then who were willing to and could afford, the prices asked in this category. In the last 2 years, it was much harder to sell in this part of the market, but there were still some great works collected. Art in this segment can be typically found on Ethereum Mainnet on market places such as Foundation. Solana and Tezos also play a prominent role. And the generative art markets such as fx(hash). You can imagine that selling in this segment is an important income stream for artists. Selling 2 or 3 pieces in this segment can already generate a reasonable monthly income. With the eyes on a next bull market coming up, this might be a great segment to explore.

Building in public

Now, whichever part of the pyramid you want to aim at, please know that your work, your art, deserves to be collected. No matter what price you set. The biggest challenge you face is to find your collector base and where and how they are most likely to mint your creations. Maybe that's at the top of the pyramid, maybe at the bottom, and maybe it's a combination. Whatever you do, remember that Web3 is a relatively new phenomenon. The idea of always being in beta that the open innovation movement claimed is very convincingly adopted by the world of Web3. That's how you can interpret the 'building in public' mantra. We are all  experimenting with how we can make it work best for us. There's a huge willingness to embrace experimentation. Don't be afraid to experiment with platforms, edition sizes and price points for your work. If a certain part of the pyramid does not yield the results you're looking for, try something different. Talk to artists, ask for feedback. Always experiment and find out what works best for you.

Now, ask me anything in the comments, if you're a paid subscriber. I'm also explaining five terms you should know behind the paywall.

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My niece inspired me to this creative prompt. When we were visiting her home, I saw she used the empty cases of Instax instant film as frames for the insta-photos (mind you: “insta” as in “instant”, not as in “Instagram”). Brilliant, I thought, and an idea was born: what if I use the otherwise to-be-discarded empty cases not just as insta-photo-phrames, but as little embellished treasure chests?

I had one left, and someone I wanted to send something to. So, I ran a pilot project. I painted the empty case, took a photo I wanted to send to my chef-friend Joseph, added a handwritten poem by me, a sticker and a printed poem from a friend, and combined it all into a little poetry treasure: a poetreasure.

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We can see
the vieux bassin from here.
And the fishing boats. If we stretch  our
necks even the Pont de
Normandie.

There’s a beautiful word in German, that signifies the opposite of homesickness: Fernweh. It’s when your heart aches for things that are far away. It’s similar to wanderlust, but more directly opposite to ‘homesick’. The perfect word to describe the desire to travel. However, far is more a matter of mindset than a measure of distance. You don’t have to go far to travel. The world is filled with beautiful places. We recently visited the beautiful old port town Honfleur. It’s less than 2 hours by car from where we live, but it feels like a different world. And just beyond it lie the beaches of Normandy. The famous beaches of the D-Day landings.

Travel is a state of mind. It’s about looking at the world with curiosity, fresh eyes and an open mind.

What is a place near you that we should travel to?

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Poésie de la vie

After visiting Honfleur, we travelled along the coast and learned something about history on the site of Pegasus Bridge. The video above is in French, but a great explanation of operation Deadstick.

Poetry elsewhere

A song of many cities. shows his skill in using rhythm, rhyme and repetition in this beautiful poem Dry Ice:

Paul’s Substack

Dry Ice

I have known some cities and I can name them all, cities large, and cities small, cities of the plain, cities of the sky, cities that sit where mountains split to draw the painter's eye, cities of day, cities of night, eternal cities, cities of light, cities of sand, cities of dust, cities of rivers, red as rust I have known some cities where pa…

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2 years ago · 39 likes · 32 comments · Paul Wittenberger

The poems of Doodleslice are always full of word explorations and turns and often a lot of humour. This one, of which the title is quite the opposite of travelling, is a great example of that. It makes you want to expand your idiom. Enjoy reading I’m Standing… Still:

I'm Standing... Still by Doodleslice

One of the many beauties of poetry is that it can allow you to travel through time. And place. The poems by proof this. Many are inspired by art, and through his poems you can travel to the time the art was made, and the scene depicted. This poem, men with brooms, is a great example, based on a beautiful photo. Enjoy:

man of aran

Sunday special: men with brooms

on Loch-Leven Scots in kilts will curl on Loch-Leven with every sweep of broom, a chilly draft each swish of brush, a frosted waft thus will kilts on Scots curl on Loch-Leven…

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2 years ago · 26 likes · 8 comments · man of aran