Maya Lowy

AFTER OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF’S “TITLE”

“Ecology is the study of the home”

I’m foresting long slopes. And winding up bunnies

to hop among flowers that smell of themselves.

This isn’t about lockdown, not this time;

this is about the world still being somewhere.

About exploitation, about the clearcutting that

wiped out our whole canopies which held each other.

Pine, juniper, yew, and cypress for the graves—

how to supplant here’s unavoidable erosion?

Cow parsley up to my eyes, children screaming, still

the same, the same, existing. This park, trees still

tall. Trees smell of books.

Trees are books. Right? So is it books

that smell of trees? How will I know

if here’s the climax forest?

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Statement of Homage

Oliver Baez Bendorf’s original, modern, organic work always strikes me. He happily leans into writing about his surroundings, placing the reader in a chunkily-, breezily-painted world, while still focusing on the speaker and the poem’s personality. This particular piece, “Title,” which is a delightful meta-poem, held my hand through writing yet another lockdown poem when, last spring in 2020, my whole world was two rooms, a park, and a forestry management class I was taking online. I felt that Bendorf’s script opened my own writing into a new direction.

Oliver Baez Bendorf

Oliver Baez Bendorf was born in Iowa City, Iowa, and currently teaches creative writing at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. He has two collections, Advantages of Being Evergreen (CSU Poetry Center, 2019), and The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State U., 2015), and a chapbook, The Gospel According to X (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). His work can also be found in American Poetry Review, BOMB, Poetry Foundation, and several other publications. He tweets @queerpoetics.

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