At the opening of Rob Macaisa Colgate’s debut poetry collection, Hardly Creatures, readers are presented with an Access Legend featuring fifteen Universal Access Symbols—symbols used in visual art exhibits and museums around the world to help potential audiences identify what events may be accessible to them. These Universal Access Symbols are found, in various combinations and reimaginings, throughout the

collection, cluing in readers on what type of reading experience they’d like to curate for themselves. Emulating the structure of an accessible art museum sectioned off into nine wings, Hardly Creatures reorders abecedarians, re-sequences sestinas, and guides readers’ physical hands toward tracing the words on the page, all in its interrogation of social media, the disability community, and what forms of intimacy are accessible, and in what spaces.

Rob and I met last year in a Zoom breakout room, during Lambda Literary’s annual Writers’ Retreat. Possibly despite, possibly because of, the virtual environment we were afforded, we immediately became fast friends—adding each other on social media, supporting each other’s work in the literary world, and occasionally messaging. By the time we met in person at a reading in Los Angeles, I felt I knew him so well already; we picked up right where we left off from our Instagram chats, like we’d been talking in person the whole time. 

Hardly Creatures is one of the rare collections that so accurately captures the permanent multimedia-hood of modern life. One is not just a physical body; they’re also an Instagram user, a Tiktok scroller, a Tweeter. One is not just a museum goer; they’re also schizophrenic, Filipino, and bakla. Reading through Rob’s debut collection, there’s this perpetual feeling that all is accounted and cared for. Over Zoom once again, Rob and I discussed meeting the needs of your readers, the accessibility afforded from digital forms of connection, and why he’s bored of the current state of disability poetics.

Jalen Giovanni Jones: I basically doubled the width of this book because I folded so many pages of it. I constantly was like, “I need to come back to this. I need to come back to this.” Let’s begin by talking about the access legend that we’re presented with at the beginning. It presents us with these symbols that we’re meant to refer to throughout the rest of the book. I’ve never seen that in a book before. 

Rob Macaisa Colgate: The access legend really just had to be there, because going into the project I knew I would be modeling the book’s accessibility after visual art’s accessibility, and a big part of that is the access symbols. I spent two years living in Toronto, working at a disability arts gallery called Tangled Art + Disability. It’s all disabled run, and puts on art shows all by disabled artists. That’s when I started encountering some of the access symbols that maybe aren’t universally familiar. 

A big one for me when I got there was the “please touch” symbols, which were in a lot of spaces. Not all the art for every exhibit was tactile friendly, but every exhibit had some portion that was touchable. I was really struck by the contrast of how pretty much every museum you go to is covered in “DO NOT TOUCH” symbols, which you learn young and just accept that you’re not supposed to be touching things in museums. When I was at Tangled, it was the first time I was invited to touch what was in an art gallery, and that was the first time I actually thought about how “DO NOT TOUCH” symbols, while maybe protecting the art on some level (which is very important), [are] also quite restrictive to people whose most valuable sense is touch. From there, I wrote all the poems and then figured out what access symbols they were going to need. 

JGJ: What led you to creating new access symbols for this collection? There were many I saw that I didn’t know, and it was immediately recognizable as something of the author’s intentional creation. 

RMC: The “please touch,” “sensory sensitivity,” [and] “assistive tablet available” are all things I had seen at Tangled and other art museums that are starting to make bigger moves towards accessibility. But my main thing [with creating new symbols] was that I was sort of bored of disability poetics—really just meaning poems about disability—and became fascinated [by] how visual art could both be about disability, yes, but could also be made accessible in experience. I felt like I needed something like that for disability poetics, that I hadn’t seen or hadn’t encountered yet. The question I asked at the very beginning, before writing many poems from this, was: what would accessible poetry mean, maybe not in the ways that mean “easy to read” or “intelligible,” but as in “meeting the needs of the reader”? How could a poem do everything a poem wants to do, while also meeting the needs of the reader? That questioning drove the whole book, the individual poems themselves, and especially the access symbols. 

JGJ: “Meeting the needs of the reader” is exactly it. I felt like needs I didn’t even know I had were accounted for while reading this collection. Sometimes there’d be a poem that was just the title, and the rest of the page would be blank. Those moments helped me realize that I actually needed to just sit and take the previous poem in, because maybe it had a lot of heavy material, or had a lot happening in it. Those moments give the reader their own authority over the reading experience. One could choose to just sit there in the blank space, or choose to reread the poem, or move on. 

There’s one poem, “History of Display,” that really stuck out to me. While reading, the poem was at once being really guiding and gentle, but didn’t let that tenderness stop it from criticizing the absurdity of our ableist world. How did you learn to strike such a balance in your writing, of making sure to meet the needs of your reader, while also remaining critical?

RMC: I paid a lot of attention to my own experiences reading. I’m not always the best reader… I’m a very tired and sleepy person, and I would sort of pay attention to things like, Okay, how many poems can I get through before I feel like I need to stop? Or, What order of poems is helpful to keep me reading? If while reading I encounter a super dense, lyrical poem on one page, enough to make me think, I hope the next one’s shorter, and then the next one would be just as dense, it would pull me out of the work. I would feel bad about that because it’d be wonderful work, but because my needs weren’t being met, I wasn’t able to give my fullest attention to the work. 

My inclination towards form was very helpful, because it helped to break apart the book into smaller units, poem by poem, and then wing by wing. It was a lot of reading, paying attention to how reading felt, and thinking about what made me feel better when I was reading.

JGJ: Along with the play with form, the structure of this collection was really unique—how it’s set up like we’re walking through an accessible museum. Did you have a system for deciding which poems were going to go in each wing of the museum? 

RMC: I’ve spent a lot of time ordering poems in manuscripts I wrote during graduate school. The scenes in my play, for example, I wrote totally out of order. Selecting the order of your work is just as much of a practice as drafting and revising is. 

I honestly felt like having the wings was sort of a hack to ordering the collection. I almost felt bad, because the wings made a lot of the ordering decisions for me. I grouped all the poems into wings, and then I ordered those wings based on where I knew certain poems had to be. There were certain poems, like “Abecedarian for the Care Shifts I Failed to Show Up for,” that I knew had to be toward the beginning. And I knew that “Bench: Eli Tidies Up” was going to be the last poem in the book as soon as I wrote it. Those markers helped me know where to put the wings. In general, ordering is a process that can deliver as much revelation as the act of writing poetry, in the same way that I think it’s a craft. You know when you’re writing a poem and it surprises you, and you know you’re on the right track because it’s taken on its own life? A lot of that happened in the ordering too. When I started putting different poems next to each other, there was a lot of surprise. There was lots of excitement. I was being taught how my poems talk to each other. 

JGJ: Can we talk about “Hopescrolling?” The poem felt very modern, how it referenced so many different virtual spaces, all these posts on social media, and captured tens of disparate experiences all at once. What inspired you to capture that?

RMC: I love to scroll, and I don’t really feel bad about it either. Like, I’m really on that phone! 

As we entered the later stages of the pandemic, and because of the challenge of the earlier stages, a lot of the reciprocal energy was clapping back at things like Zoom, virtual events, and people started talking about how much they loathed them. I don’t think it was totally because they loathed them. I think a lot of it was because it reminded them of a challenging time. Of course, the interpersonal connection is different digitally—I’m not necessarily going to say worse or better—but I also spent a lot of time thinking about how essential digital community is for so many disabled people. 

Like I said earlier, I’m a really sleepy person. I take these anti-psychotics, and they have a huge sedative effect. I have trouble getting out of bed a lot of the time. I rarely work at my desk more than I’m working on the couch, like I am right now. And sometimes I still want to be at my friend’s event, but I’m about to pass out, and so I want to do it from bed. With “Hopescrolling,” I was trying to have a poem that was like, “You know what, the internet is good and digital connection is actually meaningful. And I know we don’t want to say that because we love being together in person, but let me just make a case for it.” And so I just started literally bookmarking tweets, Tiktoks, and Instagram posts that had takes on disability. You could see people in the comments, expressing their authentic feelings on disability without feeling like they were in a conversation about ableism or something. 

JGJ: Something that I’m really curious about is how you sprinkled in references to Filipino culture throughout, but they never seemed to entirely take over any poem or section of the collection. What made you want to weave these cultural signals in, without having them take center stage?

RMC: I have a couple answers. One is that my verse play is very Filipino, and the verse novel I’m working on now is as well, so I have another outlet for that. Another answer is that writing about being Filipino is something that has been hard for me, and something that I wanted to do but knew I couldn’t force. I’m half white, I grew up going to Catholic school, and lived a pretty white life. I didn’t totally understand “being Filipino,” really, until I got to college and started dating—I’ve been out since I was 11—and found I was having a very different experience from white people. I’ve had a lot less time in my life to think about being Filipino, and I’m finally finding ways to write about it now, which is really exciting for me. 

In Hardly Creatures, I was so locked into my disability studies, and I think I really knew I wanted that to be the central to the book. That’s what I was spending most of my time thinking about. In the same way, there’s some Filipino details, but it’s never like “the Filipino poem.” It’s also a very queer book, but there’s never a poem that’s going “gay rights!” I think those aspects of identity show up because those two things—being queer and Filipino—are both ingrained in me. Whenever I’m settling down to write a book, I always have a larger project in mind. I knew the register I developed here, I wanted there to be utter, lyrical clarity. There were so many things I wanted to talk about, but trying to make all of them the main course wasn’t going to be in service of clarity. I let things come up, but made sure to keep my through line intact. It helped to remind myself, This is never going to be the last book, right?

JGJ: I totally respect a very clear artistic vision. 

Earlier you mentioned that you were a little bit bored of disability poetics, and the conversations going on within and around it. What are you hoping to add to those conversations, through the writing of this book?

RMC: I’m really just hoping that when we talk about any subfield of poetry, that it’s not just a conversation on content. I think something that’s so important about poetry is form. It’s one of the most important things that separates it from prose. Prose, formally, is a lot more limited, with its need for sentences and paragraphs. I think we similarly limit ourselves when we talk about disability poetics, when we talk about queer poetics, or Filipino poetics. What we really mean is disability poems—poems about disability. Not all poems have to be about something, but I knew for this book, I wanted a lot of poems about disability, but it’s poems, and so it doesn’t just have to be about something. There are all these other layers that they can evoke, that can direct the reader, and that can cause thinking that isn’t just about the semantics of the grammatical sentence on the page. 

I felt like I was only seeing “poems about disability” when we were saying “disability poetics.” I’m hoping that this [collection] helps open more doors toward poems that are truly disabled in form, and unpacking what that can mean. Poems have this incredible possibility to them that I really believe in, and that pulls me to poetry over other genres. We can do so much more than content. My hope is that all people—for whatever topic they’re writing about—don’t just think about the content of their poetry, but also about the form, the experience, the movements, the music—all of that.