Q&A with Robin M Eames

Robin M Eames is a queercrip poet and historian living on Dharug land. Their work has been published in Overland, Cordite, Meanjin, and APJ, among others.

Hi Robin! Your poem, ‘Leg Stories’, is gloriously sharp, kaleidoscopic and playful. What inspired you to start this piece, and when did you know it was finished?

I wrote the first draft of this poem in a kind of fever dream after reading Dan Hogan’s magnificent debut poetry book, Secret Third Thing. It’s a bit of an experiment and a departure from my usual style. Dan’s work is politically acute, deeply hilarious, and has such perfect deadpan abstraction. (You can always tell when I’m in the audience at one of their readings, because I laugh like a hyena every time.)

I’m fascinated by abstract poetry but it’s something I struggle with. Most of my work is more narrative or lyrical. For a while now I’ve been wanting to challenge myself with different poetic modes, including changing up my approach to form and prosody. Another recent poem of mine, ‘Joyride’, was written as part of a collaboration with Kerri Shying and Gaele Sobotte, and it has a wonderful thumping rhythm. I think that comes through in Leg Stories as well, to a lesser extent. The first draft was much longer. I cut it down to read at the National Young Writer’s Festival in Newcastle earlier this year. It’s still a pretty long poem, but I think this version works much better. It still has bite, but with cut teeth.

There’s a wonderful kind of cross-pollination that happens when you’re lucky enough to be in community with other trans and crip poets. I’ve learnt so much from the writers who came before me, and I hope that my work can offer something in return.

To be honest I rarely think of my poems as ‘finished’, even after they’re published. Sometimes I come back to a poem after months or years and keep making little edits. Or big ones. My writing is always shifting and transforming with me.

In ‘Leg Stories’, you write: ‘I hate when I’m writing a poem with cripple jokes & I want to make a trans joke but I have to go back & add in exposition so people don’t get confused. What’s the point of poetry if you’re not allowed to contain multitudes’. I love the way your poems confront and disrupt one-dimensional understandings of disability and transness. Does this ethos also apply to your work as a historian?

It does! I often talk about embracing the complexity, or embracing the messiness. My research is on nineteenth century trans history, so there are a lot of challenges in terms of language and methodology. At the time there wasn’t a clear separation between queer and trans experiences. They’re overlapping histories and shared sites of struggle. And a lot of the case studies I’m looking at are instances where people were arrested or institutionalised for socially transitioning. So there’s also a big overlap with disability history, which can lead to fascinating and generative research questions.

Disability justice and trans liberation have a lot to offer to each other. Disability justice gives us an explicitly anticapitalist and anticolonial vision of radical organising. It asks us to seek out forms of community care by and for the people, without relying on state interventions or legislative rights that may not be meaningfully enforced. And trans liberation gives us entry points for thinking about depathologisation without negating the crucial importance of access to healthcare.

Like old age, or pregnancy, disability and transition are part of the infinite variety of human life. We can build care and interdependence into our communities without pushing a model of medical deficit or medical gatekeeping. We don’t always need curing or fixing, sometimes we just need the right supports. This also means acknowledging the material conditions shaping our marginality, including disproportionate rates of poverty, violence, and discrimination.

The more that we embrace the complexities, the more we can build connections of solidarity and ensure that we’re working towards a better world for everyone. Not just the most vocal, the most educated, or the most proximal to wealth or whiteness, but everyone. ‘We move together, no body left behind.’

‘Leg Stories’ unfurls like a comedy set, effortlessly segueing between a variety of topics including email etiquette, acquiring a ‘lesbian breakup cat’, ableism and ‘the abyss’. I’d love to know how joke-writing factors into your creative process, particularly as a method of exploring complex themes. Has humour always played an important role in your poetry? Do you ever set out to write a sombre poem only for it to turn out funny (or vice-versa)?

I love writing funny poems. For a long time I thought that poems had to be serious in order to say anything meaningful (or be taken seriously). I started writing sillier poems when I started reading at poetry nights more often, because then I could tell whether it was landing with the audience or not. Humour is also a great way of getting people to lower their defences and consider new viewpoints. A funny poem keeps people engaged. If they’re laughing, they’re listening.

We already have so many stories about disabled grief and queer/trans tragedy. They’re valuable in their own way, but it gets tiring when that’s the only narrative available. I want to write poetry that grapples with joy and pain in equal measure. It’s a harder task, but it’s far more rewarding. ‘Leg Stories’ captures the balance quite well, I think. Initially I couldn’t quite tell if I was writing a funny poem or a sombre one, and every time I tried to take it in one direction it tilted back the other way. I quite like that tilting, off-kilter aspect. It works in this context and it gives some of the lines more weight.

It also resonates with what it’s like to move through the world as a trans wheelchair user. My relationship with public space and with other people is so unpredictable. As an example, after reading this poem in Newcastle, I was wheeling back to the hotel and a stranger started yelling at me in the street. (Not a promising start, I know, but it gets better.) A guy leaned out of his car window and went, ‘POP A WHEELIE!’, which I ignored at first—I’m used to this sort of thing—but then he went, ‘…PLEASE?’ So, I popped a wheelie. The guy cheered. And then he said, ‘I’M IN A WHEELCHAIR TOO!’, and it turned out there was a wheelchair in the back of his car. And then he went, ‘IS THAT A SMARTDRIVE? THERE’S BEEN A RECALL!’ (There had, in fact, been a TGA product recall for the control mechanism of the SmartDrive—my external wheelchair motor—the week before. I was still using it because I didn’t have an alternative.)

I couldn’t stop laughing all the way back to the hotel. It really surprised me. Every time I’m at risk of losing faith in humanity, little moments like that restore it.

Ruby Hillsmith

Ruby Hillsmith is a writer, editor and poet living on Wurundjeri land. She was a Writers Victoria Writeability Poetry Fellow, a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow, and co-editor-in-chief of the 31st edition of RMIT’s Visible Ink. She has mentored local and national Writeability groups on behalf of Writers Victoria.