Ask The Author: Oliver Bendorf

Oliver Bendorf’s Four Poems appeared in the May Issue. Below Oliver responds to our questions about Excel, fucking, and locomotion.

1. What have you used Excel for lately?

I use Excel to track my “life list,” which is a list of all the bird species I’ve seen in my life. Earlier this summer, when I was visiting my parents’ farm in Iowa, my dad and I woke up one morning at 3AM to volunteer for the annual breeding bird census. We drove along a 25-mile route of country roads, stopping for one minute at each half-mile (is that right, Dad?) and recording all the birds we saw or heard. The sun was coming up over the cornfields in a gorgeous way. I added a good handful of birds to my life list that night in Excel.

2. What is the most creative way you’ve said “fucking” lately?

A few weeks ago I got the paperwork for my legal name change notarized, which is only one step of about a billion, but I think afterward I texted someone “I’m so fucking happy” and I was. It’s not a creative way but it was one of those moments where I felt so inarticulate…I was just sort of bowled over with excitement on the sidewalk.

3. How are limbs locomotive?

Mine keep me moving forward. One time, after a breakup, I went to the drugstore and bought myself a pedometer. And I wore it every day for weeks, trying to reach ten thousand steps a day. I walked all over town, miles and miles, I walked the stairs up to my campus office on the 6th floor, and- I just remembered this- I recorded my daily steps in a spreadsheet for about two weeks. I looked up my personal record: 14,301 steps on May 9.

4. How much of your life is in your poems?

Hm, I wonder how to quantify it. Is there a spreadsheet formula for this? I guess my poems come out of my life and my imagination, and I do have a very active imagination. Dean Young said, “The blood can be fake but the bleeding has to be real,” which is how I feel too. Last year I went to my thesis adviser to talk about my poems and he rattled off a very perceptive list of their preoccupations: gender, monstrousness, perception, whimsy with a dark undercurrent, hybridity, language, consciousness, praise, love, self vs. other, change vs. permanence, boats, sailors, clowns, journeys, discovery. I feel like every one of those things is pretty close to my life…except for sailors and clowns. I can’t account for those. Farmers, on the other hand…

5. What can stop the claw?

My girlfriend’s three pet goats. They don’t ask me how I feel; they just eat generic brand Fruit Loops out of my hand. It’s a good arrangement.