Oliver Baez Bendorf is the author of three collections of poetry, including Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in the The Nation, The American Poetry Review, and Yale Review, as well as anthologies like Latino Poetry and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Oliver’s work has also earned him an award from The Publishing Triangle. Born and raised in Iowa, he holds an MFA in Poetry and an MA in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches in the low-residency MFA program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and continues to reimagine the possibilities of trans and queer poetics.
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“Trans is a way of arranging the world through change,
but plastic is durable, meaning it never goes away.”
— I Want Biodegradable Sex
This line epitomizes the distinctly queer eco-poetics that Oliver Baez Bendorf undertakes in his third collection, Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024), which was a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and named one of the best poetry collections of 2024 by Lit Hub and Electric Literature. Written during the initial years of the pandemic, Baez Bendorf writes alongside the rooster Walter Mercado to illuminate a web of relations that spans the human and the creaturely, our freedoms and our griefs, in a timescale beyond our individual lifetimes. At once philosophical and embodied, these connections become a wellspring for hard-won survival and imperfect freedom during a time of environmental degradation, late-stage capitalism, and increased state surveillance.
Most importantly, to me, these poems enact a devotional relationship to change, an intimacy we are invited into, as the poems guide us “toward pleasure / from future / gravestones.” Through an inventive use of syntax and wide-ranging of allusions, in a voice both attentive and urgent, these poems conjure instructions for arranging queer and trans resistance from any and all materials we have on hand. I have long admired Baez Bendorf’s work, and I am so grateful this book exists as an archive of the care, curiosity, risk, and longing necessary for principled survival in our current end times.
Baez Bendorf and I spoke over Zoom in early February discussing, among other things, utopia, citation as conversation, deep time, syntax as flagging, runny yolks, speculative ekphrasis, and Baez Bendorf’s steadfast notebook keeping practice.
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Aishvarya Arora: Thank you for the generosity of Consider the Rooster. Reading it left me with a different attention towards the world, which is what I believe good poetry should do. Also, congratulations—it's a hundred-page book of poems! What a feat. Now that it’s out in the world, what is your relationship to this beautiful object that you that you've made?
Oliver Baez Bendorf: Thank you. Thank you for the kind words, and for appreciating the book in ways that I also share. Writing it would have been enough. Publishing it would have been enough. To hear that its resonating and prompting insights and questions and changes of attention like those I experienced while writing it—it's exciting to hear about those ripple effects on readers. You know, I'm proud. It’s a big book, with a little rooster at the heart of it, and then, you know, it got bigger from there.
AA: One thing I admire about Consider the Rooster is how it reckoned with the imperfect ideal of utopia. Not an idealized or one-dimensional utopia, but one that includes all of us and all our flaws. You deftly manipulate found text from religious documents, queer protest speech, and even Elizabeth Bishop poems. You reimagine the Greek myth of Iphis. To me these formal choices say: our longed-for worlds and revolutionary futures must be created with the materials we have on hand. How did these materials find their way into your work? What did they offer to you? What do you want them to offer the reader?
OBB: Writing is always relational. It is a reaching out, or a response, or a conversation. It is never in a vacuum. I'm reminded of Agha Shahid Ali’s poem “Stationery,” which ends, “The world is full of paper. // Write to me.” I just love that so much. It gets at what you're describing—what's already here? What's available? I like working with inherited forms like the sonnet, the sestina. A central question for me in terms of trans-poetics is, what do I do with these forms I've received? Yes, at the level of the body—but we can ask that of the world too, right? It makes me think too of the Max Ritvo lines, “Of course there is another world. But it is not elsewhere.”
To speak to all the references you noted, my work emerges from an eclectic reading practice. I take real pleasure in how repetition can be an agent of transformation. Hearing something in a different context or repeated or combined—that’s alchemy. Without meaning to, I often memorize language. I have to filter what I take in. But I do find it pleasurable to turn something over, some piece of text, like a stone in your pocket, until something else happens. I like memorizing poems. It's a way of close reading through the body, taking in the text that originally moved through someone else's body to be written, or maybe through multiple bodies passed down through time. What does that piece of language feel like in my body? What breath? What energy?
We are constantly swimming in language. That's a funny thing about writing. I have to work in the same material to write an email disputing an insurance problem as I do to write poems. I wonder sometimes, what if opera singers got on the phone to call the pharmacy and had to sing? What would it be like? We’re constantly swimming in language and not all of it is, or should or could be, poetry—but some of it is. Poetry can definitely be found amidst it.
My manuscript’s editor, Caelan Nardone, encouraged me to lean into citational excess. I feel really grateful for that. It was a real invitation to make present the conversations I was having around the work, or people that I consider myself in conversation with, or want to be, who sparked or provoked different aspects of the book. I don't think of it so much as manipulating found text, more like writing with and through. Elizabeth Bishop is a complicated figure throughout the book. Her roosters being a kind of intertext, but also her positionality as an American abroad and the tensions of her work and life.
Finally, I think the materials of the world—poetry, paperwork, paper trails—they can be used against us, archives as surveillance or as colonial tools or gatekeeping of documentation or records of harm. But they can also be something that we make ourselves for reasons of testimony or lineage or creativity.
AA: In one of my favorite essays by the poet Natalie Shapero, she says “[Poetry] is more like an ordinary child, an unformed form that absorbs linguistic and social conventions from the life around it, then spits them back out.” Unsettling the habitual or violent use of language is our work as poets. You’re right that bureaucracy and institutional power forecloses the possibilities of the archive. Which makes citational access all the more urgent, right? The conversation the book renders is itself an archival act. Or, like being introduced to the friends of my friend.
OBB: We're resisting the forces that want us isolated, convinced that it's possible—or even desirable—to do anything alone or in a vacuum. It's not desirable to me. Where previously I’ve had questions about including too many epigraphs, this time, proportionally, in the scale of this book, and philosophically, in terms of everything we’ve been discussing, it felt important to make visible the materials, make visible that the poet is not alone. Many of our teachers are the books we read, the poems we read. It feels right for them to be present.
AA: I often had a sense of the speaker's continued existence in a web of past and future relations. For example, in the poem “Colony Collapse” you say, “swear to God / when I'm / dead I'll spend years waiting for the living / to call, offer wine and dance.” Elsewhere, there is reference to stardust, nebulas, and the cosmos. How did you think of time and futurity within the collection?
OBB: I did feel these poems wanting to zoom out in both directions—or, you know, multiple directions. From the backyard egg to the cosmos, and personal memory, ancestral memory, deep time. As I was writing the book, having access to that simultaneity felt like a real rooster gift.
How is it possible that this creature can be so revered and valued and sacred in certain times, certain contexts, persisting throughout time, and reviled or devalued in others? For me, the layers of symbolism around the rooster were a real question and curiosity about time. It’s also something like poetry itself, resonating like the rooster’s crow across time, trying to imbue it with a sense of being sent into the future.
The rooster's crow and the egg itself became these recurring portals for the arranging and rearranging of matter, of the matter of the cosmos. The idea of particles of stardust in a yolk of egg—what happens when that yolk is taken into a body? What happens when that body is sent back to the earth?
That image of the rooster’s crow, and the yolk, and the supernova—things can transform and are also remain what they always are. I don't think about futurity and time in a structured way, but I feel them press upon me. Poetry and specific images are often how I move through the pressures of time. The rooster’s crow has a duality that resonates so powerfully. Where the roosters crows in poetry, the sound can bring you into the absolute present, or portal you to other places and times. I didn't fully know until the end of the revision process that it was an ode to the rooster’s crow.
AA: As the sound of the rooster’s crow traveled, it accentuated the artificiality of human-imposed boundaries between public and private landscapes, like forests, prairies, and lawns. So many poems in the book have an awareness of thresholds, perimeters, and edges. In “Who Profits from This Feeling” you write about shame, saying, “…you are invited to practice every day getting rid of it. You could walk it to the edge of your body and out the door and down the street over and over and over again.” The first three times I read this line, I thought it said, “You could walk to the edge of your body and out the door.” And I was like, oh, hell yeah, freedom. Then I was like, wait a minute—shame, shame can go. It's a great line.
OBB: What an amazing misreading. I’m interested in edges as crossing, as being a place where change can happen, where difference rubs against itself and things are somehow more alive because of that. Where two different landscapes meet tends to be way more biodiverse. Walters's crow troubling boundaries, whether it's lot lines, fences, public, private, I love playing with the awareness of limitations, of borders. Temporal edges or thresholds of dawn and dusk also run throughout the book, associated with the crow. For me, they also offer a more metaphoric resonance of something dawning or something awakening.
Even though creatively I find thresholds very generative, runny yolk totally freaks me out. I cook the shit out of my egg yolks. They unsettle me. It's their runniness. The fragility, the inability to contain it, I find viscerally unnerving. But to create, to write along those energies, it's something for me about expansion and compression, the movement between those two things. The tiny little detail amidst the vast. I like thinking about shapes a lot too. For me, underneath or alongside these literal thresholds is the fact that I exist at a political edge in this country. I've often like found solidarity in ecosystem analogues. Not just survival but flourishing that takes place in an ecological edge or threshold.
AA: In “Settler/Unsettled,” you write, “But every queer is the family scribe, right?” There's such an intimacy to the delivery of that question. How does queerness inform your use of language in Consider the Rooster”? Elements of like fragmentation, uses of the subjunctive tense, and exclamation points, all felt like queer uses of language to my ear.
OBB: There is something very queer about who get to tell the story, or who gets to keep the record. In this way, the inheritances we receive and how they are held and passed on and shaped in cultural lineages—it does really live at the level of language. Language and the body. I love what you honed in on. With fragmentation, there’s a real intimacy to insisting on being whole while also existing in pieces. Maybe we exist in pieces necessarily by the nature of queerness and navigating the world we live in. Fragments operate on the levels of pieces and wholeness.
AA: The idea of flagging is coming to mind for me as we talk about fragments because it invites additional and layered readings—places to fill in the gaps if you can hear the thing or see the thing. If you’re available for the reading.
OBB: Definitely. Reading, being read, queer practices of reading and being read. Close reading to find each other in different contexts. I love the idea of clipped syntax being an invitation. Readers bringing their own experience or their own rhythms or their own hopes for what it might say. I do hope that that spaciousness is experienced as a kind of generosity.
There are also two poems in the book that are in the form of wall texts that accompany art. I think of those as speculative ekphrasis. With everything that we're talking about, I think there are queer dimensions to that—wall text for pieces of art that don't exist outside of the poems.
It's about the act of imagination. Even if something doesn't yet exist or hasn't yet been assembled in quite that way. “Somewhere swings open a gate we all know we all want” from “T4T” is in some ways a mini-thesis for me on this whole topic. The way that syntax and sound can create openings or possibility and how that can both shape and be shaped by queer experience in relationship to language. To return to the idea of edges and thresholds, creating an alertness to language feels part of that, too.
AA: The book is 8.5 by 11 inches and oriented in landscape. When I sat down to read it, that was all I was doing. It’s so wide that there is nothing low key about opening it. It invited a reading that felt more like an encounter, an invitation like a line from the book’s opening poem “door’s open. soup's on.” How did the design of the book come together? Did the design process inform the revision and evolution of individual poems?
OBB: When I wrote the book, I wrote one section of it in landscape orientation.
AA: Can I guess which one?
OBB: Yeah.
AA: Was it “alternatives”?
OBB: Yeah, 100%.
AA: By the time I got to that section, I was like, I know how to be in these landscapes. The book had taught me how to read it.
OBB: When I first sent the manuscript to Nightboat the document was portrait except for the section that became “alternatives,” where they did appear in landscape. It was a really supportive process with the press—once we had talked about the centrality for me of those particular poems, they decided the whole book was going to be landscape to honor that section. I hope that it offers for the reader an expanded and immersive encounter—one that deprioritizes the humancentric features and functions of portrait mode.
Once I knew it was all going to be printed in landscape, some poems were rewritten drastically. Some changed in response to life happening off the page—I wanted to honor my book’s stance on change by letting the poems also be changed. Expanding the structure of the book almost paradoxically involved sharpening the citational excess, the section titles, and writing more poems, including the final section “no i didn’t turn away” that comes after the landscape poems in “alternatives.” The book could have ended after the landscape section, right? But to me, crucially, it doesn't. A different version of the book could have, but this one brings you back. Yet it isn’t entirely a return. Something had changed. Even the title of that first poem in the last section, “becoming upright after a strange siesta” is a wink to that shifting orientation. The return to portrait mode opened up for me when I realized that it wouldn't be a return at all.
AA: It sounds like there was a yielding to the poems, which opened the door. I love hearing about that because sometimes it's hard to yield to the poems. But when it happens it feels really true.
OBB: In the first version, “alternatives” was shorter. There were only three poems. I had them all spread throughout the book to contextualize them or buffer them. Now there’s five or six. It was Caelen, my manuscript's brilliant editor who encouraged that. What happens if we cluster the landscape poems and there are more of them? I wrote more of them as part of the revision process.
AA: The final section also seemed interested in how poetic techniques map onto living. I’m thinking of phrases like “volta breath.” I'm interested in how the poems we write help us live. That’s what gives the work real urgency. How did writing these poems inform your living? When we close this book, where do you hope readers may arrive to? Where did you arrive to?
OBB: You go through something. It feels like everything has changed, or on other days, nothing. The productive tensions between arriving and asking what’s next? The book is less about one specific journey or arrival—leaving Kalamazoo, getting to Olympia—and more about that love letter to change. I am often sending my poems ahead of me. Even in figuring out the relationship between fragments and stanza, or between sections of a book and a book, all of that is a way of trying to figure out how to live. If they offer that to a reader, then I'm super grateful.
The writer Rane Arroyo, who is really important to me, I didn't I find his work until after he had died in 2010, but he was also a gay Puerto Rican, Midwestern poet, playwright. His last public words, at his last reading, before he died, his last public words were “live, then write,” and those have really stayed with me. That alongside Gwendolyn Brooks’ encouragement not to “…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.”
I wouldn't want something resolved on the page that is more interesting and more honest as a question. I'm honored that readers would come along on the vast and personal journey of this book. I hope it offers something about greeting whatever's next. A handoff into the next thing, whatever it is, the next thing that the reader is tackling in their day, the kind of cycle of creativity that became this book.
AA: That reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the book: “Yeah, but if God is change, then is it God who sent my matter hurdling back into the open open?” Before we hurdle back into the open open, since we started with this theme of attention, I’d love to close by asking you about your relationship to the comics artist Lynda Barry’s work. I know she was one of your teachers. Through her books, she’s one of my teachers too. Her pedagogy makes material the practice of active attention, which to me, is so much of poetics. What non-poetry practices are fueling your attention right now? What practice is filling your poetic cup?
OBB: My childhood loves remain my engines for both life and creativity. Writing, drawing, basketball, and animals. It's been funny and sweet to look around my life recently and see those practices did really persist. All of them in different ways fuel my approach to composition and movement. I've been drawing and painting quite a bit over the last year. It offers a return to something—sometimes it's an arrest from language, sometimes it's elemental like gesture, the whole body, marks and breadth and pressure. For me, writing and drawing both shared that immediacy of the line, of shape and rhythm and space and to have something framed on a page, like we've been talking about. Lynda Barry's workshop, it really was formative for me. Practicing with collage as a way of being in between projects or even more explicitly using found materials, moving them around on a page. That workshop sparked what is still my current notebook practice.
My notebook is a common place where I'm fueled by calls to attention. Note booking as an act of noticing. The lifesaving and haunting power of an image as it occurs across media or drawing, for example, really helps me to understand the kind of visceral power that an image in my poetry can have. I just have a more intuitive understanding when I'm able to understand it on a continuum with other art forms, not just that the image in poetry as its own isolated, discrete thing that might make up one week of an intro to poetry writing workshop. I want to know it as a thing that we all know and feel and respond to in all kinds of art.
