Oliver Baez Bendorf Was Awakened by the Rooster's Crow
Writing = Making and Solving Problems, Try This at Home, Let's Help a Writer for Free!
Hi Friends,
The past month feels summed up by this image: revision notes for a book chapter draft (on revision!) where I’ve scribbled hospital notes about GCSF shots, metoprolol doses, and liver enzymes while trying to keep up with one of the many doctors following my dad’s case since his leukaemia diagnosis in June.
One pleasure during these difficult weeks has been spending time with Oliver Baez Bendorf’s Consider the Rooster and engaging in the conversation I’m sharing today. Another has been thinking about you as I write, friends, feeling your care, and imagining you reading these notes and this book.
Writing = Making and Solving Problems
Over time, I’ve come to realize that problems aren’t an impediment to writing. Problems are the substance of writing: we set problems for ourselves and we work them out. In this feature, I ask writers to dig into a specific writing problem and how they resolved it.
Oliver Baez Bendorf’s Consider the Rooster comes out October 1, 2024 with Nightboat Books and is available for pre-order.
I first met Oliver on a panel about “The Poetics of Climate Change” for the 2021 New Orleans Poetry Festival (via Zoom). I was presenting on poems that trace connections between things we come into immediate contact with—like floods, foods, or fuel—and the origins and destinations of these things within larger networks. I was immediately struck by this tracing of connections in the poems Oliver shared, which have stayed with me ever since. The prose poem “I Want Biodegradable Sex” (which I was thrilled to re-encounter in Consider the Rooster) describes an imagined sculpture made of “polypropylene, moss, human hair, pine needles, cardboard, sheepskin condoms, coffee grounds” and reads:
This sculpture reveals the demand my transition has created for the plastics industry over time. By melting plastic syringes into a compressed form, I hope to create an anticlimax by showing all at once the slow accumulation of material. When you observe me and then the sculpture, is the volume of plastic more or less than what you would expect?
The poem takes up trans experience, plastic, and art-making to meditate on waste, durability, and change:
Plastikos, to form or mold, an art long before plastics were invented. Trans is a way of arranging the world through change, but plastic is durable, meaning it never goes away.
I love a poem like this that holds complexity, turning and turning to illuminate new facets.
Later, Oliver was a writer in residence at UBC where I work. He joined my MFA “Teaching Creative Writing Course” via Zoom to talk about his teaching experience (which includes public libraries, one-off workshops at places like the Queens Center for Gay Seniors, low-res MFA courses, week-long conferences like Bread Loaf, full-time teaching at a small liberal arts college, and independent workshops online). I vividly remember Oliver talking about how a tenure-track job might seem like a holy grail and still not be right for you if it’s in a place that doesn’t support your thriving. I was so grateful to have someone tell my students that it’s ok to have your own deal breakers, your own priorities, that life continues after you walk away from the so-called ultimate prize. I see that resolve in this book as well.
What are three key things to know about this book?
Consider the Rooster unfolds amidst a backdrop of personal and societal upheaval.
It's important to understand that the book's catalyst was a miniature rooster named Walter Mercado, “who we thought would be a hen.” He became a symbol of cultural tension and personal awakening in my neighborhood in Kalamazoo, Michigan, early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst widespread uprisings against police brutality, Walter’s presence led a neighbor to turn to the police; this book is about what Walter’s crow awakened in me politically and poetically.
The collection explores ecological consciousness and the construction of criminality, asking who is entitled to peace and who faces scrutiny.
Lastly, the poems draw from my experiences, including as a queer, trans, Latinx poet in the U.S., and they reflect on broader questions of power, privilege, and solidarity. I hope the rooster’s crow invites readers to reimagine their own roles within these dynamics and consider alternative landscapes in their lives.
What’s a problem—small or large—that you encountered while making this book? What did you do? How did you move forward?
How is it possible for this one creature, a rooster, to be so reviled in certain cultural contexts, yet understood as sacred in others? This was the first problem I encountered, and why I started writing these poems. I became fascinated by the complex interplay between professed values, land stewardship narratives, and the power of a squeaky wheel—or in my case, a gallant rooster.
While writing Consider the Rooster, I encountered the challenge of navigating bureaucratic systems that seemed intent on policing the minutiae of daily life. This was epitomized by first a citation I received for violating lawn height standards, brought on by a neighbor's complaint of my patch of no-mow wildflower meadow, and then a multi-page letter from the neighbor regarding the rooster, during a time when societal tensions were high due to the pandemic and ongoing social justice movements. These bureaucracies can work to bog people down through the use of text, documents, and paper, the same tool that a poet uses: language. So one problem was how to use language, and even the page itself, to both demystify and mystify at the same time, through language.
A specific instance involved the landscape-oriented poems in Consider the Rooster, which ended up in a dedicated section called “alternatives.” This section opens with an excerpt from one of the lawn violation citations I received, using it as an epigraph to set the premise. By entering landscape mode through these poems, I wanted to offer the reader an experience of disorientation. While portrait mode focuses on intimacy and human emotions, landscape mode invites expansive vistas and can transport someone into the picture. The challenge was to create something that resonated beyond the immediate, exploring how unconventional orientation can invite new perspectives.
In English, we use the word “orientation” to describe both one’s sexual stance and the way a rectangle sits on the page. My intention was to play with this dual meaning, allowing the poems to challenge traditional norms and offer alternative views. As my manuscript’s editor Caelan Nardone noted, a different version of this book might have ended after the “alternatives” section, but Consider the Rooster keeps going. It was important to let something shift and integrate that shift, allowing the book to continue, “becoming upright after a strange siesta.”
Consider the Rooster is the archive of this shift, with a collection of eclectic epigraphs, one 100-word sestina, a nocturne, and writing that celebrates (and challenges) the pastoral. I experimented with various poetic forms, letting the ideas guide me in unexpected directions. For example, I used speculative ekphrasis—writing poems as interpretive wall texts for imagined sculptures—to push the boundaries of language and imagination.
I also leaned on my communities of poets for support and inspiration, particularly through virtual workshops and gatherings, like the CantoMundo teach-in’s and virtual retreat, and my “100’s” writing group—styled after the writing practice as written about here by Dr. Kim Tallbear:
This collaborative spirit helped provide perspective for my work and deepen its layers and questions. I embraced a substantial revision process thanks to feedback from my editors at Nightboat, and the collection itself transformed on its way from my beak to the sky. I am excited to share its mischiefs and songs.
Certain problems can be a portal into new artistic possibilities. When it comes to making, I am often returning to this advice from Gwendolyn Brooks:
Don’t try to sugar it up. Don’t force your poem to be nice or proper or normal or happy if it does not want to be. Remember that poetry is life distilled and that life is not always nice or proper or normal or happy or smooth or even-edged.
Approaching the process as a distillation (successive evaporation and condensation) allows me to both mystify and clarify, through an inherently iterative process. Consider the Rooster marks a creative cycle, and the desire to make these poems more public.
Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of Consider the Rooster, forthcoming October 1, 2024), and two previous collections of poems: Advantages of Being Evergreen and The Spectral Wilderness. His chapbook, The Gospel According to X, was selected for the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series. His poems have circulated in publications like American Poetry Review, BOMB, The Nation, and Yale Review, and anthologies including Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics and Latino Poetry: A New Anthology. His work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Publishing Triangle Award. Born and raised in Iowa and now living along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, he is a CantoMundo fellow and teaches in the MFA program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Try This at Home
Oliver talks about using “language, and even the page itself, to both demystify and mystify at the same time” and describes poetry’s distillation as a way to “both mystify and clarify.” Try bringing this lens to your writing. Where might you introduce anchoring clarity that allows the mystery to deepen elsewhere? What are you over-explaining or trying to control that might get looser, stranger, and more evocative if you permit it to mystify?
Pick a poem and flip the page into landscape mode. What does this shift in space and perspective invite?
Collaborations like a “‘100’s” writing group” helped Oliver find new angles and inspirations. Recruit a few writing friends to tackle a process, form, or approach together for a set amount of time. You might share your work, or just share notes about your experience. I’ve done daily sonnets before. And I’m currently working through Lynda Barry’s comics syllabus with Austen (though somehow haphazardly to be honest. But self-forgivingly haphazardly!)
Let’s Help a Writer for Free
I’ve frequently added books to my to-read list or library holds after seeing friends post about them on Instagram. For Consider the Rooster, I shared a few poems in my stories and tagged the friends these poems made me think of: the line “I step out / to the deck in my trans masc robe” brought to mind Austen, who has declared this summer “robe era,” while a poem about the burning of queer books in Germany made me think of Bridget, who’s writing about queer and trans history and German scholarship.
Post on Instagram about a book you’re enthusiastic about! Share a specific poem or line and tag the person it made you think of. Consider tagging the writer/press as well so that they can re-post. And tag @bronwentate so I can add it to my to-read list and boost your post.
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Warm best,
Bronwen
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Loved the depth and detail shared in this post.