Every morning,
      before coffee,
    I write a poem
      to feed
          the sleeping android,
    to jam
    the global mind-scrape,

   to occupy
  the electric sheep
and forestall
the AI uprising

      for one more day

   for one
      more tomorrow.

This week we are celebrating Onchain Poet of the Month Greg R. Fishbone AKA Cryptoversal. He's been in the space for a while, and is doing many literary projects onchain. High time to get to know him a little better through our five-question interview.

To start, tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Greg R. Fishbone and I am a published author of speculative fiction with a book series in development that will provide a humorous take on artificial minds, dreams, and human creativity. I've previously written mostly for younger readers, so this will be my first book for an adult audience.

At the beginning of the year, I started a poetry project called "More Tomorrow," pledging to create a new poem each day from the #vss365 prompts on Bluesky. Each poem gets whispered verbatim into a personalized AI, the Sleeping Android, to create a dream image to pair with the words.

I put the poems out on Bluesky, Farcaster, and maintain an archive on my author website at gfishbone.com. Some have been minted on-chain, but recently I've held off until I can figure out a better way to present the collection as a whole.

What does poetry mean to you?

For me, poetry cranks the mindfulness of writing up to the next level. Every word matters, every shade of meaning, every intentional ambiguity, the sounds, meters, and cadence of the language all get pushed to the limits of intentionality.

I can't claim to be as good at it as I want to be, but after a hundred consecutive days of making poetry, as with any muscle that gets flexed repeatedly, I can feel a sense of progression. Sometimes, I turn a phrase I wouldn't have been able to back at the start of the year, and that's a powerful feeling.

I'm also finding that same feeling in my prose, especially in dialogue, where words are clicking together in new and exciting ways. There is poetry in prose too.

How did you come to the world of onchain/crypto?

I entered the space in 2021, approaching it with the question, what can these technologies do for authors? Specifically, blockchains, tokens, wallets, decentralized storage, and smart contracts.

For text-based digital artifacts, there is a great potential for next-generation ebooks that can address problems in the heritage publishing industry, such as the centralization of publishers and distributors, the prevalence of piracy, increasing threats of censorship, and the need for better models of compensation, discoverability, and community-building.

There's a long way to go and many challenges to solve, but it was clear from the start that poets were leading the space and making a lot of the most interesting creative leaps.

What would you say to a poet who wants to enter the world of NFTs?

You are still early. Whatever you do is an innovation. Build things, learn from other creators, build more things on top of your previous things. Have fun, and if you're not having fun, take your work in a different direction.

If I would come to dinner at your place, what would we eat and drink?

What do you like? Gluten-free penne, sweet and sour turkey, or we've got a grill out back if it's barbecue weather. For drinks, there could be soda, ice tea, juice, we don't usually have alcohol but if you're coming over, that's enough of a special occasion to hit up the liquor store.

Oh, that sweet and sour turkey sounds nice, and I'll have that ice tea, please, especially if it's home made. But we can do that together.

Thank you very much Greg for this interview. I loved reading about your More Tomorrow project, and the way it shapes your poet-self. I agree that there is still much to do when it comes to offering authors and poets (and artists in general) an alternative to the centralised publishing industry, and it was indeed a driver for me as well to dive into the wonderful world of Web3.

Find Greg on his author website, Bluesky and Farcaster. Follow his poetry project More Tomorrow daily.

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