#oliver bendorf

[acensusofstars]

outing, iowa // oliver bendorf

[whatihavebeenreading]

I bought The Spectral Wilderness by Oliver Bendorf after hearing him read Love and the Bodega for the Ours Poetica on YouTube.

I won’t give it a star review. Poetry, to me, is too personal and depends to much on feeling it that I could just qualify it on a one to five scale.

"It's a joy … to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender... Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category."

--Mark Doty, from the Foreword

Some of my avourite lines:

[wgs285f18]

Images: one screenshot from and whiteboards from December 5, 2018. Link to slides: HERE.

[theoffingmag]

When is an opposite an absence? When I finally introduce light, I want to be loved for it. I want to stare out into a crowded room, the spotlight so blinding I have the feeling of being alone even though I’m not, when someone shouts from the back of the room, “What do you love?” I tell the room how much I love to fall asleep in the presence of others. I. I tell this entire bright-dark full-empty room about the time I fell asleep at an Aretha Franklin concert, not because I was bored, but because I wasn’t.

Oliver Bendorf, “Dark Sky Associations,” published in The Offing

[funkyqueers]

[A photo of a copy of Oliver Bendorfs "The Spectral Wilderness" with a black cover with a beige anatomically correct drawing of a tadpole growing into a frog. The book is placed on wooden floor.] I don't know a lot about poetry. I find it hard to talk about. Everything I feel like saying about this feels too personal for instagram (I have weird and entirely arbitraty boundaries, I don't understand them either). This was good and affirming and timely and reminded me that just looking at something beautiful can be healing sometimes. Some things went over my head and some things got way to close. I'd say, read it if you like poetry and have weird shit about your body and like nature. Also, the poem about wanting to marry someone even though you have a complex queerfeminist critique of the instution of marriage made me feel very called out. The other poems mostly made me weep and sigh.

[aphidempire]

“Outing, Iowa” by Oliver Bendorf

If you’ve ever doubted that a body can transform completely, take the highway north from town, past the crowded diner with the neon sign for pork loin sandwiches, and go left at the arrow for the lake. Can I tell you? The land where I was born was born an ocean, and that ocean born of ice. Researchers and floodplains have undressed its chipped-up secret: plates shifted, glaciers melted into river, into rows of corn that flip-book past your car. Park anywhere and follow the trail back in time toward the effigy mounds, the sacred piles of earth we’ve managed to preserve, and all that’s buried underneath. I still bleed, still weep: what we used to be matters. Here’s a brachiopod, here’s me twirling in a gauzy blue dress in the afternoon sun. Trace these fossils with your tongue and place them in my hands, which will never be any larger. Lay your ear against an iceberg while there’s time and sing to me its trickle. Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open. I’ll sparkle so hard you’ll forget you thought this land was flat, as though you’d never find the valley, bedrock, ancient sea.

[therumpus]

Three poem-comics by Oliver Bendorf for National Poetry Month: Day 12.

[therumpus]

[Bianca]: There’s a freedom in defining poetry comics for us, being able to pluck from the past and mold as we go, creating a genre like little gods! I feel so lucky to have such a passion for it. So lucky to explore and be at the beginning.

I’ve come to realize that what is poetry can evolve; we’re part of the trajectory of modern poetry, and if we stick to it, and do it well, it will stay.

Spotlight: A Poetry Comics Discussion featuring Oliver Bendorf, Sommer Browning, Jon-Michael Frank, and Bianca Stone. Art by Jon-Michael Frank and Sommer Browning, respectively.