Between their debut poetry collection, Hardly Creatures, and upcoming verse-drama My Love Is Water, it’s clear that Rob Macaisa Colgate is an experimental formalist who leads by example. His execution is bold, authentic, and ingenious: we are not only led to his waters, but shown how to drink, gently and with care. 

In Hardly Creatures, Rob takes the reader through poems about disability and community in the form of an accessible art gallery. I wandered through the book enchanted, each section a new room and each poem a feast of language and possibility. But the poems are not just akin to beautiful pieces of art—that would be too obvious. Accessibility icons mark each page, some in variations invented by Rob, displaying how to experience the poems from perspectives outside of our own. There are love poems throughout disguised as “benches” for places to rest, and blank pages for moments of reprieve while reading. With deep sincerity juxtaposed with a lightness only someone who has faced the dark can truly embody, Hardly Creatures is a collection you simply must read to understand, as the care taken to lead you through its corridors is an experience in and of itself.

My Love Is Water takes the traditional form of a drama and fills it to overflow—every stage direction a poem in and of itself. With unflinching vulnerability, the book explores queer relationships, desire, disability, and Filipino culture through scenes of long, messy parties. The reader is immersed into Danilo’s world without mercy, along for the ride as he encounters gay ghosts and drugs and his own inner turmoil. 

Rob and I met at Sewanee Writers Conference last summer and became instant friends via Charli xcx’s Apple dance. It didn’t take long to realize that Rob was not only devoted to brat summer, but to language, to poetry as a lifeline, and to the deep care of himself and those he loves. Rob and I met on Zoom to discuss both of their books being published this year, as well as their process as a disabled poet. The interview attempts to uncover not only the intricacies of Rob’s writing process, but who they are as a person, which is so deeply interwoven in their work. 

My Love Is Water and Hardly Creatures are both available now. 

Lizz Dawson (LD): One of my favorite things about you is the way you hold (what could be considered) the frivolous and the thoughtful in equal regard. Your pop culture is as sacred as your disability poetics, and I see this both in you as a person and in your work. For example, the poem ‘Hopescrolling’ in your collection Hardley Creature (HC). Do you feel like that’s true about you? And how or why do you balance the two? 

Rob Macaisa Colgate (RMC): I think it is, and I really like your word. Frivolous. That’s so apt. Holding the frivolous with the serious has always been a balancing act for me, and I think I used to do it a lot less consciously. It used to be a very natural mode for me, and it still is natural, but that my internal workings have started to become more forward-facing because of publishing books, folks are cluing into that, so I’m treating it with a little more sanctity. But I think even before I started writing these books, I became aware of that dialectic. 

I do have a lot of memories of being in college and friends who only knew me from social settings thinking I was pretty dumb. I remember somebody coming to my neuroscience thesis presentation and coming up to me, and saying, ‘That was really good!’ They were shocked or something. This made me realize that this dialectic that feels basic or congenital, or just like intrinsic to me, is perplexing to people in a way that has never perplexed me. And so, it was one of those things that I learned to tap into in the poetry because I was already doing it. But I mean, poets, we’re so often writing from ourselves and writing to bridge the gap between the little we know about ourselves into that space of what we don't know about ourselves. And the more we do that, the more we start to understand that gap and be able to more consciously attend to it. By the end of writing Hardly Creatures, I recognized this harsh juxtaposition, which I'm just very attracted to on a literary level. It’s just exciting to me when a poem has texture, and one of the most natural ways I move towards that texture is allowing anything to be sacred and allowing what seems unnatural to be right next to each other.

LD: I read MLIW on a plane after spending a long weekend with you in LA for AWP, and I found myself in tears. The prose, from the stage directions to the final moment in the acknowledgements where the speaker dives, was so full and textured and overflowing with care. Talk to me about how you caretake your work. 

RMC: Oh, my gosh! I'm so glad you asked this question, because it's so much a part of my poetics. I love this question. My Love Is Water (MLIW), even though it's coming out after HC, was written first. And HC is this big community book. It's this concerted project. Yes, it’s my first published book, but it's far from my first manuscript project, and I felt like I could move into the community of HC after I really dug into the personal in MLIW in graduate school. HC is personal, but it was also very outward-facing. And MLIW was just about me figuring my shit out.

That caretaking process… I really try to think of the writing as living beings that we help to animate and that we should take care of. I believe when we approach revision from that sort of restrictive, punitive, violent hearing, not only does it give us trouble listening to the poem, but I think it can also affect rigor. Because I don’t think violence and rigor necessarily go together; rigor has a certain level of care to it. Instead of trying to fix the poems, we can just listen to them and ask: ‘What do you need to survive? What do you need to thrive?’ Not only do you probably end up making more meaningful changes than you would have when you were trying to ‘fix’ the poem, but it also becomes a less negative process.

I drafted a lot of the individual scenes in MLIW, coalesced them into the whole play, and then just went through the play and started getting in there on a line level. I knew I was almost done when I felt the poems and the scenes reacting. There’s a certain level of care when you're going through and you're, maybe, removing extraneous words. That feels like exfoliating or getting a haircut or clipping nails, right? And then there's a certain amount of revision where it feels like you're nicking the skin while you're shaving. I just had to really be quiet and listen to the poems, and notice, as I streamlined the entire play, what was exfoliative and what was rupturing the actual surface of the poems. 

So, it's a lot of just listening, reading out loud, spending a lot of time with it, a lot of time away from it, negotiating the relationship. But it's always been much more productive for me to develop that relationship with the written work as sort of a care collaboration as opposed to authority. I think the poems, the scenes, sound better and know more than I do as a person, and once they take over, they become better representatives of my ideas than myself. Why would I try to try to be in charge of them? They clearly know what's going on better than I do.

LD: There is such a compassion and love towards the main character in MLIW, regardless of the sad, messy, flawed parts of them. You show every bit of it—as if shameless. Your poems feel shameless and willing in a similar way. As a writer, are you shameless or is this something you work towards? I guess I’m asking if it comes naturally or what this process of vulnerability is.  

RMC: Such a good question, and not one that I think I've talked about yet, even though every little write up of the book is like ‘with shocking vulnerability!’ And it's always a little funny to me, because I feel like it’s just me. Vulnerability feels very natural to me; I have a lot of practice with it. With something like schizoaffective disorder, it's hard to navigate it completely under wraps. You've seen me try to. It's not super successful, especially with my primary support system. But I also think I'm an over-sharer from the jump. 

Pulling back to what we talked about earlier—that sort of sanctifying of both the frivolous and the serious—maybe I also do that because everything kind of feels the same to me. I wasn't expecting people to talk about the vulnerability so much, because I really didn't realize I was doing it. Everything is sort of par for the course for me. It feels equally as intimate to share my partner shoving antipsychotics into my mouth as it does for me to talk about crip theory on a theoretical level. I don't think I have a good barometer for what is too vulnerable, and what is, I don't know, socially standard to talk about. This hasn't really wronged me too much, because I’ve found that the thing about vulnerability is people are much more willing to receive it than any of us realize. I only realize my own vulnerability when people are like, that was a lot to share. But then, it's been shared. We're in the moment. They haven't run away. If they have, okay. 

That is something I feel grateful for, that [writing poems] hasn't been this great balancing act. I thought, this is what I have to say. Why would I not? I’m not writing poems to put up a veneer between myself and the truth. What am I hiding? We're publishing the book. One other thing is, I didn't think about this book being published and people reading it when I was writing. It really is just me and the poem in that shared moment, and so it’s very easy to say what I need to say in those moments. 

LD: I often feel like writing—when you begin to publish—can start to feel less like a labor of love and more like labor. The marketing and consumption culture in publishing can feel very capitalistic, and maybe even trivial at times like these when there is genocide and such political disarray. How do you mitigate that and still feel love for your work and not just pressure or apathy? 

RMC: So real. Something I've been enjoying in this process has been when I can make the forward-facing part of it all feel like art and feel like what I come to poetry for. I've been having a good time with interviews because I'm trying to make sure I do them with my friends, so I get to queen out. I also try to be pretty disciplined and use my Virgo moon to make sure that there is, within all of the forward-facing stuff, a chance to return to the work. I take the train to work every day, and I don't do anything except read or write on the train. No phone. That's huge, because I make sure I have half an hour every day to be with literature. Sometimes I feel like I do have to just compartmentalize, which is like the name of the game in these times. I don’t spend every day like, oh, I should be writing. That's just a miserable way to live. There are days I wake up, and it either is, or it isn't a writing day. Otherwise, I’m just trying to make everything as close to the delight I feel in a poem throughout this process of bringing the book into the world. 

I also am just trying to be so grateful because I’m so fortunate to have experienced so much of what has happened to me, and I never want to not revel in the gratitude. And so, even if writing and reading the poems is the most fun, when something more external happens, I'm just focused on grateful, grateful, grateful. It also helps that the book published first is Hardly Creatures, because the book was written with the reader in mind and with access in mind and with sharing a lot of joy about a community. It was really designed to be meant for the reader as opposed to just something the reader happens to encounter. 

LD: So you touch on my next question… There is such a deep sincerity in your poems in HC. The poems make me feel so held; they have truly made me view my mental illnesses more lovingly. Is that an intention you have for your work? 

RMC: Totally. I realized that I really wanted to keep poetry at the center of my life, and to do that, one of the best things you can do is publish a book. Once I tasked myself with this, I thought, let's invite everyone. Let's make this book social. Let's make this book communal. I think that's the only way I'm going to be able to mentally process taking one of my projects and bringing it external to myself. I spent all my time writing in graduate school utterly unconcerned with anything but myself. But HC was a very concerted project about inviting people in. And that's not every book, and that's not every book for every poet. That's not every book for me, either. It's never the last poem. It's never the last book. But for my first foray into the world I was like, well, it's going to be with and for everybody. 

I had sticky notes up on the window above my desk when I was writing most of the books at Macdowell. One of them was ‘Clarity for the people.’ I love dense poetry. I love experimental poetry, but I knew with this book, I wanted clarity and invitation. It felt good to make strong, conscious choices about bringing people in.

LD: Do you think the way you hold and care for yourself contributes to the care the reader feels while reading?

RMC: Yeah, and it's different between the two books. In MLIW, that book reflects the care for myself a little more because the book really was written as a personal processing. Things felt so dramatic when I was going through a variety of situationships. I thought, this just has to be a drama, so I'm less personally embarrassed about it. I was just so fed up with how I felt about my own experiences, and I was like, well, let's dramatize it a little bit. But I also don't know how to write anything but verse, so it had to be a verse drama. Though it was a personal grappling, I don't really subscribe to poetry as therapy. That's what therapy is for. But poetry is certainly useful and cathartic, and that's definitely what brought me to MLIW. The care there is that I went into those poems not with any ideas to prove about Filipino gender or queer situationships or caregiving. I really was just like, Oh my God, what is happening with me?

By the time I got to HC, I had done that big excavation with MLIW, and I felt confident to ask myself how I could take that lens and extrapolate it outwards. HC became a lot more about very thoughtfully attending to myself and recognizing how I might bring that into the poems. I was doing a lot of reading, and I was noticing when I would get tired, or when my attention would start to drift off, and just that information alone helped me order the poems and helped me structure the stanzas for the reader. 

Because I had given myself so much space for the personal spilling-over in MLIW  and everything else I wrote before HC, when I got the HC, I felt able to make it about community. You know, once you take care of yourself, you can take care of the people around you. I don't know if you've ever heard about that… I think Ru Paul said something along those lines?

LD: How did HC begin to take its published shape? The form, an accessible art museum, is fascinating, and will, I’m sure, be discussed ad nauseum, so anything you want to say about the whole process is welcome.  

RMC: I've mentioned before, it was not my first book-length project. I just had a lot of practice not just with the craft of writing poems, but with the craft of collecting poems. I'm also such a formalist, and I’m all about experimentation that has a grounding in the content that it is experimenting around. I appreciate a unity there, or a bond; this was really important to me with HC. I loved the idea of the collection, as a form, to actually mean something about the topic of disability.

I worked at Tangled Art + Disability, a disability arts gallery in Toronto, and saw what a fully accessible art gallery looked like. And I knew that was what I wanted the book to be. This is something I say every time I talk about the book, but I wanted to move away from disability poetics being poems about disability and into poems that were both disabled in content and experience. Once I saw art that was both about disability, but also that you could touch, or also that had ASL interpretation, I was like, okay, I want poems about disability that also engage disability and their experience.

So first, I knew it was going to be a gallery. Then, I knew I had to populate it with art in that gallery. I was able to write it poem by poem, and everything sort of shimmied into place after the poems were written. My partner hangs all sorts of art around the house, and he doesn't really think about if it's going to blend with his aesthetic, so the pieces may get wildly disparate. But that just creates an aesthetic, as opposed to recreating one and only accepting things that are going to fit. Same with the form of the book. I had the individual poems; they were going in. I was going to trust that they would wiggle their way into the book.

In HC, I wrote poems experimenting with form as well. In ‘We Do Not Enter the Gallery,’ it begins in these tighter stanzas, and as the speaker starts to have a psychotic break, the lines start to spread across the page. Simple as that. Form doesn’t have to be so complicated. Sometimes, form can start to overtake content, and I still like to know what's happening in the poem. I'm still really here for language.

LD: What I appreciate so much about your work is the ways you explore the nuance of having a disability. For example, you write not only about the difficulties of living with one, but the difficulties of its erasure and invisibility. In the interview with The Rumpus, you use the term “sane-passing.” There’s a line in your poem “Therapist,” which gives us a statement from a previous therapist, “The voice says, You have such a handle on things / it’s like you’re not even actually ill.”  

I just don’t see this discussed enough—the idea that even if our disabilities are masked or managed well, they exist, and we (or someone or something) is taking so much energy to care for them. This energy is unnoticed by anyone but the disabled person, and that in and of itself is exhausting and isolating. So, first, thank you for bringing this to your art, and also, how would you like to see this change or what do you believe we can do as a collective to take disability and mental illness more seriously? 

RMC: I think in our understanding of mental disability there are some figurative jumps we seem unwilling to make that would be really helpful. I think a lot about when queerness was a mental illness in the DSM and very well-meaning psychiatrists thought, ‘You have this thing wrong with you. It’s a disease. But don't worry! There are lots of things you can do to cope and live with it. It is horrible, though, so you do want to suppress it as much as you can.’ Which obviously is horrendous, and now psychiatrists can't really talk to a person like that, right?

I’m thinking about the movement from thinking of disabilities as a sickness to instead as something that is challenging. Because yes, those challenges are coming—though not always from the actual variation, but more from how society is treating that variation. If society stops treating it like an illness, then it can be more of a value neutral variation. Being queer is really hard, but it's mainly just hard because of societal thoughts around it. I'm also willing to do hard things with my life, and it actually can bring me a lot of great joy. I think mental disability is the same. Okay, it’s hard, right? So is life. I'm willing to deal with challenging things if they are part of who I am. And of course, if people didn't treat it as an illness in society, and just allowed this part to exist, it would probably all be way easier. 

We can also compare it to physical disability. It seems it can be more easily comprehended that when people have a physical disability, life is still rich. They still want to be alive. It's no different for mental disability, but people are really ready to take mental disability as that final nail in the coffin. But for me, there is something expansive about being willing to live with challenge, and also to recognize that so much challenge is not adherence to our identities, but rather how our identities are processed. It feels important for me to then say, I don't have any issues with being schizoaffective. I have issues with the ways that it is crunched into a box that forces me to live with more strife. 

When I was about to move to Canada to do disability studies, I remember being petrified. I thought, I'm way too normie. I’m not radical enough. And it took a long time of mentally adjusting, thinking about disability all the time, to then realize that the reason it felt big and scary and progressive was because it was—in a way I felt I was failing to be. It’s a challenging space to move into, and I think the world is slowly starting to move into it, but it's scary in the same way that I'm sure it was very scary for folks to move into queerness being accepted on a broader level. I guess my hope for this book is that it helps people start creeping into the space with us a little more, with a little help, with a little guidance.

LD: My other favorite part of your disability poetics is the way you eliminate the idea that disability and caretaking has to be “right” or “wrong”—or even loved and appreciated. It can just be neutral. It just is. I’m thinking of the poem Access Request and the line “Everything is wrong. I feel like myself right now.” Can you talk a little more about this? 

RCM: I guess the broad answer is that there are so many wonderful memories and good experiences I've had that have come through the coping or grappling with disability. A lot of really slow, gentle mornings I've had have come the morning after a psychotic episode. A lot of habits I've developed to be a little more in control of my psychosis, (so I can participate in capitalism), I really treasure. I have a pretty rigorous fitness routine, for example. These coping mechanisms have become some of the most wonderful parts of my life and I really only got there because I needed to cope with something.

In terms of neutrality, once I started doing disability studies is when I really realized that there was actually nothing super inherently harmful about my particular psychosis. And even if there were, that's totally fine. I also think that if there had been more space around parts that were harmful, they could have dissipated a lot more easily. What  psychosis looks like for me is a loss of language to schizophasia. I would wander off and I'd be talking to myself. And, you know, that is not actually an awful way to spend an evening. It's only awful when you have to be up at 5:30 AM to go to work. It's only awful when there are cops patrolling who might try to fuck with you. It's only awful when you know people are trying to keep tabs on you and make sure you don't do the wandering off, right? But when I'm able to wander around at night, and I'm trusted to come home, and no one is going to incarcerate me, and there’s nothing I have to do early in the morning, nothing really happened to me during a psychotic episode. 

Even with mood stuff, when you’re depressed, if you don't have to keep your apartment clean, and you don't have to cook, and you don't have to show up for work,  and you don't have to text people back—if there's a lot of grace around those things—I find the depression passes a lot more quickly and naturally. Or at least I'm not, you know, meta-depressed because I'm punishing myself for all the things that the depression is keeping me from doing. So, recognizing the neutrality can come from giving ourselves the grace to spend time with these disabilities or experiences.

LD: Do you feel our stories, literature, is enough to affect change? 

RMC: That's a great question. I would have to say yes and no. I think us as writers have a really important role, but I also think every person has two important roles, and it's to do the personal action and to do the collective action. I never want the personal action to come at sacrifice of the collective action. I never want to be like, well, I'm writing disability poetics, so I don't need to boycott or donate. There are collective actions that we all can and should be doing. I'm going to be a writer. That's what I do. I'm going to write poetry. It's going to be about disability by and large, and that is my personal fist in the air. The other fist in the air is grabbing hands with everyone else.

There is a part of the poem “omfg,” where the speaker breaks and is crashing out in a poem and says, “listen do you even like poems or are you / just reading this at some coffee shop to / seem cultured omfg these poems will / not make you into a better person.” I've committed my whole life to poetry. It's the thing I care about the most, and it's a wonderful thing to commit to because if it ever starts to feel really intense and really serious, you can kind of pull back and be like this is a poem. This is a page of funny words that a ton of people don't even want to engage with, and there's something lovely about that little bit of distance. At the same time, of course I believe in the power of literature. I don't think I could be doing this with my life if I didn't believe that the stories we tell are going to change something. It’s more of a belief in literature than my literature. I see HC as a pebble thrown over the fence. I really believe in the body of writers who I am writing alongside with these days, and I think when you start to see books and poems and essays coming out that are all shifting the tide, that is really what effects change. My book will do what one book can do, but my book will also be a part of new movements in contemporary literature. And those waves are very powerful. 

LD: What’s something no one sees or focuses on in your work that you wish they would? 

RCM: Obviously, these projects are trying to make large social points and be rigorous with form. That goal is clear. But I think people don’t know or see that I only do what I want. I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. When I was writing these books, there were no forced poems. As much as these were concerted project books, as much as I was trying to communicate larger ideas, if I didn’t feel like writing about something, I didn’t. And that’s true across my entire body of work; there's nothing I wrote out of a sense of obligation to say something about a certain topic. 

LD: And that’s on caretaking, diva. 

RMC: Yeah, what did Miss Paul say again?