In 2024, Cord became the first poem ever sold by a living poet in the history of Sotheby’s. Caballero presented her poem as part of the Sotheby’s Digitally Native auction focused on the archeology of the Bitcoin blockchain in January 2024.
Cord is a villanelle, a century’s old poetic form. Caballero selected one of her most technologically complex poems to be her first inscription onto Bitcoin, the mother chain, the complex decentralized ledger that heralded a technological revolution. The poem from Ana María Caballero’s prize-winning book Mammal, probes how the inescapable rhythms of our physicality govern our emotional hungers.
We like to view ourselves as in control, but the reality is that desires we don’t fully understand determine how we relate to ourselves, our partners, our children, our parents. Metaphysical, spiritual quests are launched from the plane of the sensorial, which hinges on our animalistic need for survival. Intimate relationships, too, are at the mercy of our inborn—and often opposing—longings for both emotional stability and adventure, generating subtle layers of conflict with others that we have difficulty comprehending.
No entity can claim credit for the way our bodies work, and as such any attempt to brandish the body as a weapon is baseless. Embodied experience is murky ground, at once the root and lofty branch of consciousness, but if we are to disassemble the narratives that are used against us, we must first dare to name them–without romanticism or preciousness.
The tension between physicality and selfhood, between biological processes and their cultural implications, and between ecology and the storylines we construct to explain (and thus attempt to contain) it are plumbed in this poem.