NER intern Zoe Eng talks with poet Rob Macaisa Colgate about the act of “lifting,” externalizing the internal, and his poems “Ode to Pissing” and “Therapist” from NER 45.1.
Zoe Eng: You graduated with a degree in psychology from Yale University and pursued critical disability studies alongside your MFA in poetry at the New Writers Project at UT-Austin. How do these areas of study inform your poetics?
Rob Macaisa Colgate: All I have ever really been interested in are big feelings and any accompanying notion of wrongness. I was a STEM kid, so when I got to university I assumed studying psychology and neuroscience would be the quickest way towards a clean and clinical elimination of psychopathology. But then in an undergraduate workshop with Claudia Rankine, to whom I owe my life, she presented an understanding of poetry as distinct from other genres by its inherent emotionality. After everything else I learned in that workshop, I decided it would be okay to follow poems.
During my first year of graduate school, I was lucky enough to take a crip theory course with Alison Kafer, to whom I also owe my life (I’m not very attached to it). It was the first time I had encountered the social model of disability and its notion of access as an alternative to curative violence. It allowed me to critique and transform my knowledge of psychology into a framework that was not contingent on something being wrong with our feelings. Now the last thing I want to do is eliminate disability (mental or otherwise)—I want to help build lives around taking care of it.
Currently, my creative and scholarly concerns intersect at the notion of the disabled poem. So often we refer to “the body” of a text; if a poem has a body, then that body can be disabled, and this can be a source of wonder rather than a pathology. I am more interested in taking care of my poems and providing them with access than trying to fix or cure them. I imagine poets as support workers for our poems; the poems have all the revelations, and we just gently facilitate. And care is so reciprocal—the more I take care of poems, the more they take care of me back.
ZE: In “Ode to Pissing,” the first line of each stanza references a word from the line before it (i.e., “magical,” “Melodrama”). And speaking of repetition, I was especially intrigued by the steady reappearance of the words “lift” and “song/sang/sing/singing.” Could you talk about the process of organizing this poem? What does this kind of emphasis afford the poem that a more varied diction could not?
RMC: Last winter, I couldn’t stop noticing lifting everywhere. I started taking notes of every time I encountered the word or any variation on the action. As instances accumulated, it became apparent they all wanted to live together in a poem while also maintaining their anecdotal integrity. To me, poetic gestures like repetition or assonance only work because they represent real life; it only made sense to write about the ubiquity of lifting (and the care implicated to each lift) in a way that mirrored the physical repetitions I observed. There are no accidents in language. The fact that the word “lift” works in reference to both a toilet seat and my partner getting me into bed means the underlying emotion in one action is present in the other, however quietly. Words don’t develop their multiple meanings and connotations randomly; poems let us see this.
As for “song,” I drafted the poem in a time crunch last summer at a workshop and decided to lean into it when I saw myself repeatedly using the word—again, there are no accidents in language, and I often find that the precision that comes with repetition serves the poem more than the openness of linguistic variety. Once I was repeating “lift,” “song,” and “piss,” I thought to myself, just go for it, and started the end-line first-line repetition. I was trying to have fun, and I had a lot of fun.
ZE: “Therapist” resonated with me, in that it details an experience that is unfortunately more common than not—the experience of working with an uncommitted therapist. In my own writing, I find it difficult to tackle the subject of mental health without resorting to cliché. What advice would you give to writers attempting to externalize topics that are ordinarily kept private?
RMC: I tend to believe that the personal is all that we have. Even with something common or clichéd like therapy, you can keep getting more granular until you have something wholly individual. Yes, your therapist said something absurd just like everyone else’s therapist. Now what did their perfume smell like in that moment? How much sweat was still on your forehead from the bike ride over? What did you decide not to say to them? Now say it to us.
None of this to say there is no merit in writing about the public universal—only that what you actually end up with in that situation is your unique and private lens on that universal. I also always advise that one should write under duress; that is, the compulsion towards poetry should be so overwhelming that you have no choice but to follow the ridiculous thread. I don’t think poetry is necessarily the place to play it safe. One can still write casually, of course, but in the way that you try to act casual on a first date when you’ve already mentally decided the names of your future children.
ZE: I read somewhere that prior to graduating from Yale, you claimed to have written “at least one poem every day since the beginning of 2017.” Do you still continue this practice? If so, what systems have you introduced into your life to make this level of output possible? If not, what made that period of time especially prolific?
RMC: Are you Nardwuar? I cringe at that info being out there, not because it’s untrue, but because I fear it makes me look like a whitewashed, canon-touting, “you must write every day,” out-of-touch professor. The real reason I started writing a poem every day at the start of 2017 was because I had dropped out of university to be a full-time psychotic and had absolutely nothing to do after I finished my five daily hours of intensive outpatient programming. Once I’d written a poem a day for a full year it felt weird to stop, even after I re-enrolled in school. But I cheated all the time, skipping a week and then filling seven backdated pages, or having one particularly inspired day then taking a week off. Sometimes writing is about creating false tensions and urgency to convince yourself to do the thing you love.
I finally stopped daily poems around the start of 2022 when my focus split towards different, more concerted projects. Those years of daily poems weren’t necessarily prolific—maybe in quantity of words, but I think nowadays I still produce a comparable amount of revised poems I’m willing to show the world. I do a lot more fragment scavenging now in place of rough drafting, but revise for the same amount of time or more. All that said, I remain on a constant mission to relax more, to write sloppily, to not sit around waiting until I think I have a good enough idea that is worth my time. Poetry is always worth the time, in the same way that it never is worth the time but we do it anyway.
ZE: “Ode to Pissing” and “Therapist” will appear in your debut poetry collection Hardly Creatures which is coming out next summer from Tin House—congrats! It’s my understanding that this collection is a project book based in an accessible art gallery. Are the NER poems representative of the rest of the collection? How do they differ?
RMC: Thank you—I’m so thrilled to be working with Tin House to construct this gallery (and shoutout to Tangled Art + Disability, the gallery in Tkaronto where I work that inspired the project). The collection has poems stand in as both access features and artworks themselves. “Ode to Pissing” is the gender neutral bathroom of the gallery, while “Therapist” is part of the Medical Portraits wing. These particular poems relate to the metaphorical nature of the project more on a content level, in that they embody their role in the museum through their topical focus.
Other poems take on the conceit of the gallery much more physically. Some artwork poems create tactile replicas of themselves through erasure; another poem turns its page into a sensory room that readers can flip back to whenever they need a break. Every wing starts with a cento composed of lines drawn from the poems that follow, all spoken by an access support worker in order to flag for the reader what lies ahead. All of the poems are marked with universal access symbols in the corner that gradually take on their own visual poetic language. Stylistically, though, the poems attempt to sustain the voice of one primary speaker across the whole collection.
ZE: What does your personal canon look like? Which poets have served as touchstones or influences for “Ode to Pissing,” “Therapist,” and your forthcoming debut?
RMC: I owe a lot to my queer ancestors: Tim Dlugos and Audre Lorde immediately come to mind. Anne Carson and Richard Siken were quite formative for me early on, as well. Raymond Antrobus, Tommy Pico, and Khadijah Queen are new pressmates whom I have not met yet but will never not rave about. Last summer I took a workshop with Leila Chatti that changed everything for me. Oh, and everything that Milkweed publishes in their Multiverse series. Revelatory.
While writing Hardly Creatures last fall I had in my pile Jackson Holbert, Chessy Normile, John Lee Clark, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Bhanu Kapil, Marie Howe, Katie Condon, Adrienne Chung. More recently I’ve been leaning on Don Mee Choi, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Cindy Juyoung Ok, and Anne Sexton. But really, it’s my friends that make any writing possible for me. Jody Chan and I collaborate on a lot of crip poetics events in Tkaronto and I like to say that they haunt all my poems. Multiple poems/stanzas in Hardly Creatures came from playing poetry games on my balcony with Gabrielle Grace Hogan and Kurt David last summer. Gabbie and I used to listen to Lorde at 1 AM in Austin at our favorite coffee shop and just write and be menaces to the community. That’s what a poem really is to me.
Zoe Eng is a Posse scholar and a senior at Middlebury College, majoring in film and media culture and minoring in English with a creative writing track, and French and Francophone studies. On campus, she is a Spring 2024 NER intern, and an intern with the Posse Foundation.
Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is a disabled bakla poet and playwright. He is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025) and the verse drama My Love is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). His work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, and Poets.org, among others, and has received support from MacDowell, Fulbright, Lambda Literary, Sewanee, and Kenyon Review. He edits for POETRY Magazine as a reader and Foglifter Journal as managing poetry editor. He received an MFA in poetry and critical disability studies from the New Writers Project at UT Austin and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta and poet-in-residence at Tangled Art + Disability.
Photo courtesy of Felicia Byron