Crypto-poetry

A self-styled British poet claims to have become the world’s highest paid poet ever after earning a share of over $500,000 for a single poem.

Not widely known in the academic poetry community, Arch Hades has nevertheless carved herself a niche online, posting eminently shareable daily poems for her 1m Instagram followers.

Now she has capitalised on the NFT craze to sell her 102-line poem Arcadia for $525,000 at an auction at Christie’s New York. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are similar to a digital receipt, based on blockchains – like cryptocurrency – permanent proof that you alone own a work of art, can have access to it, and have the right to sell it on.

In other media, most prominently digital artworks, NFTs have sold for up to $69m as speculators seek to capitalise on a perceived persistent value. At a more grounded level, performers and creatives have seized the opportunity to try to make their work accessible to all at a reasonable price (NFTs can be created to be ‘minted’ by multiple purchasers) but the most recent high profile project, a collaboration between top US YA authors, was abandoned after issues were raised about copyright, ownership and the danger of exposing their teenage readers to potentially very volatile investments.

Arch’s one-off NFT, Arcadia, was a collaboration with visual artist Andrés Reisinger and Grammy-winning musician RAC, presented as a nine-minute film. It ‘explores the concepts of modern day anxiety and loneliness as by-products of cultural and societal constructs’.

The buyer has not been named.