Turning my latest poem into a non-fungible token (NFT) on the blockchain

The new crypto concept of the non-fungible token (NFT) has gained momentum and traction in the cyber and tech world recently with it being used mainly for gamers and their in-game assets or collectibles, as well as among artists who have found a way to release their artworks on the blockchain as a digital token. In this way artists are able to verify authenticity and prevent plagiarism, as well as procure royalties in the secondary market for any future sales of their digital artwork.

But NFTs are not only for visual artworks or game collectibles. It’s possible to tokenize any document in order to authenticate it and preserve the copyright or ownership thereof. I have just launched one of my latest poems as a NFT. This is also art, although in written form, so I decided to mint it as an NFT among my other visual artworks.

It’s a first for me although I’ve written many poems before. Usually I publish them in my blog, so they are already copyright protected or timestamped on the blockchain for posterity, but I decided to try something original for myself. Others have probably done something similar already. I mean if you can mint a Tweet as an NFT – something with zero literary or artistic value – and sell it for a fortune on top of that – then I can certainly tokenize my original written poem, which has artistic merit in its own right.

I don’t expect it to sell really. You could simply copy the poem anyway so who would want to buy it? I only minted two copies, one for sale and one for my collection. So even though there is only one such token for sale on the market, it still requires interest from a buyer, and that may be rare. I’m nobody important so I can’t expect my poem to sell like a random Tweet by someone famous. That’s the difference. I might make something with greater artistic merit, but nobody cares about art as much as they care about celebrities or – more importantly – resale value.

A Tweet by someone famous will retain value due to the person involved and thus the long term value of anything related to them. It’s like a collectible or some sort of memorabilia. Something from a famous person, like the socks of Michael Jackson, or the guitar of Jimmi Hendrix, will retain value indefinitely, while poems are a dime a dozen from random literary geniuses who are totally unknown.

Not that I’m a genius, tough my poem does rhyme and is set in neat couplets that would impress Byron or Yeats, in my insignificant opinion. So art is totally relative and fame or status appears to carry more weight than actual art does in a world where the tokenization of everything means that the value and particularly store of value into the future, is made to be more important in our capitalist and money-driven society. That’s just how it is. In future I might even be able to put my poem to music and make a song out of it, which can also be tokenized as an NFT.

I have written the poem down with commentary in another blog post already, if want to read more about it here. But if you want to see it and read it in NFT version, then you can check it out at my art gallery on the Hive blockchain and read it here. There is one NFT edition of the poem for sale to some literary scholar or patron like you.