On Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez Bendorf
by Wayne Miller
Hi, I’m Wayne Miller. I’m a poet who lives in Denver, Colorado, and I’m here for Poets on the Plains.
Today I’m going to read a poem by the poet Oliver Baez Bendorf.
Born in 1987, Baez Bendorf grew up in Iowa and has lived in Washington, DC; Madison, Wisconsin; Kalamazoo, Michigan; and Olympia, Washington. He now lives in the Colorado Front Range and works as a user experience designer. He is the author of three poetry collections, and he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Canto Mundo, as well as a Publishing Triangle Award.
Baez Bendorf’s poems are wide ranging in their subject matter. For example, his poem “Nebraska” explores the landscape of the Midwest as both familiar and alienating as the speaker drives through it on his way from Michigan to Washington State, re-enacting a familiar trope of American history and cultural myth—the migration Westward. Baez Bendorf’s poem “What the Dead Can Do” is a quiet and moving litany of small powers the speaker imagines the dead having over our lives—to “make it so the backyard smells / just like a Christmas tree,” to “make a bird land wherever / they want,” to “make // a head of lettuce go bad.” There’s also a deep focus on the natural world—and particularly on animals—in these poems, from tadpoles to eaglets, owls to foxes, coyotes to woodpeckers.
Baez Bendorf is a transgender man, and his poems often think in complex ways about what gender is and means. His most recent book Consider the Rooster, just out in fall of 2024 from Nightboat Books is, at the time of this recording, a finalist the National Book Critics Circle Award. I’m going to read its wonderful title poem, in which a rooster offers to the speaker—and to us—a layered and nuanced defense of masculinity.
Consider the Rooster
Who did not ask to join this world any more than I did.
Who scans for trouble as he pecks the ground.
Who announces when a hawk lands in the naked maple above.
Who emits a low trill to warn the flock.
Who does this on instinct to protect potential offspring.
Who rarely takes a treat when offered scrap or seed.
Who instead yips to gather the hens around it.
Who sometimes does this regarding some shiny piece of trash.
Whose wattle catches light the way red lipstick does.
Who slept between breasts as a day-old cockerel.
Whose first attempt to crow sounded like a flopping sock.
Who directs with one stiff wing.
Who we thought would be a hen.
Who reminds all in earshot that like it or not another day has come and gone.
Who disturbs the interior idyll of the neighbor writing lectures on environmental philosophy.
Who keeps the hens alive to lay another day.
Who would risk his life to protect.
Who cockfighters gas up on steroids and provoke to battle.
Who they then point to as an example of how violence is natural among men.
Whose crow can scare away the devil and rouse the dead back to life.
Who will provoke a strong response of either humiliation of joy.
God, I won’t be your sacred chicken if it means I have to fight, but I will fight.
I already scan the perimeter.
Testosterone, yes, I take it. Which is not the same as fighting.
The shape you see has nothing to do with me, or the rooster
Who sleeps in a cardboard box in the garage because the philosopher called the police,
Then asked for eggs.
Do you hear that crow that sounds almost like a recording of a crow?
That’s daybreak. It is regular like daybreak. Or twilight. It rattles a certain
Window that matches its vibrational frequency. Because the glass, under all that
Strain of air molecules around it, finally decides to change.
| from Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024) |
In our modern world change is possible—change from one physical gender to another, and also from one type of world to another. The rooster “would risk his life to protect” “the hens,” and his crowing “can scare away the devil and rouse the dead.” This fierce, protective strength is a fundamental part of what a rooster is—a fundamental part of the rooster’s maleness.
The speaker in the poem, in alignment with the rooster, will, if necessary, fight to protect his world, his people, and his masculine self. Alongside the rooster, he encounters the regular hypocrisy of the neighbor who both calls the police on the rooster’s crowing and asks for the hens’ eggs.
The poem’s speaker keeps looking at the window waiting for the light of the outside world to “finally decide to change”—something for which the rooster (and also the transgendered speaker) can be a harbinger.
I’m Wayne Miller. Thanks for listening.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
WAYNE MILLER (b. 1976) is the author of six poetry collections, most recently The End of Childhood (Milkweed Editions, 2025). His awards include the Rilke Prize, two Colorado Book Awards, a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Translation Fellowship, six awards from the Poetry Society of America, and a Fulbright to Northern Ireland. He has co-translated two books by the Albanian writer Moikom Zeqo—most recently Zodiac (Zephyr Press, 2015)—and he has co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016). He lives in Denver, where he teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and edits the journal Copper Nickel.
FEATURED POET
OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF (b. 1987) is the author of three poetry collections: The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State University Press, 2015), Advantages of Being Evergreen (Cleveland State University Press, 2019), and Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, 2024), which is longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in periodical such as The American Poetry Review, The Nation, and The Yale Review, as well as in anthologies such as Latino Poetry and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and CantoMundo as well as a Publishing Triangle Award. He lives in Longmont, Colorado. https://www.oliverbaezbendorf.com/
