Entering the Gallery: Hardly Creatures and the Difficulty of Display

Hardly Creatures, Rob Macaisa Colgate’s debut poetry collection, functions as the gallery, the art, and its opposition all at once. Arranged like the floor plan of a museum, these poems guide readers room by room through a reality often unaccommodating to those with disabilities. Here, Colgate puts access itself on display, exposing a limitation—and lack—that haunts artistic spaces. Even more, these poems showcase what a more accessible alternative might look like.

The book opens with an access legend: a menu of pictographs that also run throughout the collection, appearing alongside the title of poems. Some of these icons serve traditional, informative purposes, such as “Trigger Warning” or “Plain Language.” Others are mischievous, such as a “Please Touch” symbol later found plastered across the body of one poem. Often, these icons are combined or modified to add nuance to a poem’s subject matter, an ever-evolving lexicon. The familiar individual-in-wheelchair icon finds its head replaced by the symbol for “sensory sensitivity,” marking the convergence of the two concepts. Throughout Hardly Creatures, we are in the midst of an act of creation; the result is a playful, experimental infrastructure that explores how access can be applied to art.

The opening poem, “We Do Not Enter the Gallery,” occupies its own section of the collection, “entryway.” Aptly, this poem introduces the conceit of the book-as-museum and encapsulates many of the themes awaiting the reader. “We Do Not Enter the Gallery” is awash in negatives (“Alex does not notice the digital ASL tour is only available for certain artworks. / Lorraine does not struggle to read the didactic panel hung high above her chair”). On one level, the poem is a diatribe against the difficulties that people with disabilities face in the simple act of visiting a gallery. Yet, the poem also offers a new world, an imagined future where such individuals are not hidden from view, are not functionally barred from entry. “I do not begin to wonder what it might look like / if my friends and I built a gallery of our own. / I do not begin to wonder what it would feel like to belong.” The use of negative space emphasizes a recurrent, aching void: disabled people are so often viewed as either objects or absences, in reference to some positive, normative standard. 

Wide-ranging in tone and topic, these poems lead by example, showing us how the world could be, how a book could be.

Colgate’s gallery becomes a focal site for exploring this negative/positive dynamic in the convergence of art, privilege, and access. In “Self Portrait and Tactile Replica as Living Ghost,” Colgate writes devastatingly of

…the realization that everything beautiful

ever created for you was the result of an explicit request,
and now on the subway home it is harder to believe

that the boy actually wants to hold your hand, that you
are not simply part of a quietly-funded diversity initiative

whose sponsor is very satisfied, very proud of himself, 
putting up with your moods as you stare slack-jawed

at your reflection in the subway window and understand:
this is the only portrait of yourself that you get. 

The art gallery is a site of privilege, embodying the inequality of not only monetary access, but as importantly, access to time, energy, and physical spaces. And this transcends the privilege to consume and create art: it is, even more, the privilege of authentic representation that the art bestows. Disabled people are so often observed, and yet their needs are strangely absent from the public sphere. Hardly Creatures is Colgate’s formulation of a reality that more expansively reflects these particular considerations. 

This intentional act of re-creation is wonderfully encapsulated in “Hôpital des Beaux Arts.” The poem is structured in the shape of Venus de Milo. The “Please Touch” icon is peppered against both sides of the poem’s body. Colgate invents an alternative history where Venus, in “a little fit,” cuts off her arms and is enrolled in a hospital rehab program. In the end, Venus emerges as the work of art we already admire, but her physical body is recontextualized through the lens of disability:

…Let her
brokenness be revered, her body
made gorgeous by its lack of 
reach. Let her pupilless eyes
gaze inward with wonder

Surprising and innovative, Hardly Creatures encompasses anger, hope, despair, and wonder in a dazzling display. Wide-ranging in tone and topic, these poems lead by example, showing us how the world could be, how a book could be. Even as it highlights the negative spaces—the lack of fair access, the absence of understanding—Hardly Creatures ultimately attains something more. More than poetry, it is possibility. Colgate shows us the potential of art that not only allows for us, but actively welcomes us into its fold.