POET

Rafael Campo (1964 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Rafael Campo's life has been filled with seemingly conflicting desires, one being his pursuit of a dual career as a physician and poet; another is his wish to please his parents while still following his homosexual leanings, and yet another is the wish to be accepted by an Anglo-Saxon society while embracing his Latin roots. All of these issues fill Campo's books of poetry as well as a prose memoir. While in his early thirties, Campo won an award in the prestigious National Poetry Series, resulting in his first published collection of poems. He once told the Chronicle of Higher Education that he had been reluctant to "come out" as a poet, but he now is comfortable prescribing poetry to patients and discussing it with medical students, just as he incorporates his medical life in his poetry.

When Campo was in medical school at Harvard, he thought perhaps he might be able to change the contradictory parts of himself. He considered abandoning poetry, which he had written since he was a child. He also thought he might be able to purge himself of his homosexuality and ethnicity. Instead, he took a year off to earn an M.A. in creative writing and has since struggled with these personal demons in his poetry. Gay and Lesbian Literature contributor Frederick Luis Aldama summarized his technique: "His poems are highly structured, usually sonnets in iambic pentameter; he uses the security of form as a position from which to delve deep into the heart of his own feelings—feelings for his AIDS and cancer patients and for emergency room arrivals who have suffered from brutal encounters with an overwhelmingly homophobic and racist American society."

In his first collection, The Other Man Was Me, Campo's themes include reviewing family history, such as a raft trip from Cuba, and the rewards and horrors of treating AIDS patients. The poet's grandfather and father are frequent figures in his verses; a common subject is his father's difficulty accepting his son's homosexuality. Objects of joy are his partner, whom he has married, and their adopted son. The poems show his rejection of traditional culture in order to assert his sexual identity and, while feeling alienated as a gay man, finding ways to make contact with others.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer called Campo's approach "firmly topical" and described the poems as "compact, accessible." Campo's strengths were deemed to be his use of narrative and "assertive exploration of personal and political material"; his weakness was judged to be "trite and awkward" language. In a review for the Voice Literary Supplement, Robyn Selman offered that the "stories Campo's sonnets tell in their episodic vignettes are thoroughly gripping, though squarely patrilineal." The critic found the larger issues of "diaspora, racism, and elements of culture that can and can't be lost" in Campo's depiction of his family history and commended his use of "pure" poetic forms: "Their employment to tell such a nontraditional story is one joy of this book." More praise came from reviewer Matthew Rothschild in Progressive. He called the collection "an astonishing piece of writing from someone I'd never heard of before" and was determined to follow his career. Rothschild said the most "striking" poems were about Campo's relationship with his father and treating AIDS patients.

Emergency room scenes are central to Campo's second collection, What the Body Told. According to Aldama, "Here his poems are short and succinct, assuming the form of the doctor's rapid diagnosis and notetaking." Comparisons to William Carlos Williams are unavoidable, said Aldama, but the nature of AIDS makes Campo's poems more highly charged: "His poetry acts both as a way to get nearer to his patients, himself, and his sexual identity, and as a prophylactic that allows him safely 'to touch my patients without the protective barrier of latex.'"

Campo's prose memoir, The Poetry of Healing, addresses the subjects found in his poetry and describes the difficulty of being a poet-doctor. In an interview with Zoe Ingalls for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Campo called poetry an "anti-credential in medicine." The book is a series of autobiographical essays rather than a straightforward chronology of his life. It shows, however, progressions in the young man's life, including his rejection of Catholicism because the church rejects homosexuality and, most importantly, his struggle to overcome a defensive disdain for his AIDS patients. In her interview Ingalls recounted, "He tells how poetry became the medium of empathy in his life—healing rifts both internal and external while helping him connect with his patients across lines of class, race, and sexuality." Campo also talked to Ingalls about his recommendation of poetry to patients: "Poetry can dramatize healing or communicate what it is to be healed. . . . A lyric poem grabs you in the same way angina probably does, or in the same way the ecstasy of lovemaking might grab you. It's that physical. It's cathartic. You feel the heart pounding."

The Poetry of Healing won praise from many different quarters, including reviews in medical journals and a Lambda literary award. In Christian Century, Arthur W. Frank examined the book as a piece of "medical self-reflection" that challenged the administrative restrictions common to the profession. "Campo's writing—the transformation of life in narrative and poetry—is the final expression of his fidelity to his patients. . . . The problem is that Campo's employers do not want physicians acting as witnesses. . . . Campo shows the difficulty of cultivating public-spiritedness as an individual virtue within systems of managed care."

In The Lancet, Daniel Davies remarked that the "first line set the tone for the collection—'His erection startled me.' The writing is intimate, confessional, and unashamedly honest." Davies also credited Campo with "insights of unusual intelligence and sensitivity," and called the author's interactions with AIDS patients the best parts of the book. The reviewer was uncomfortable with one aspect of the book: the author's descriptions or "reinterpretations" of illness. "Campo alters them in a way that might not be true to the experiences of his patients. The problem is stylistic. His prose—spare, polished, figurative—sometimes seems dubiously inappropriate to his subject matter," said Davies.

In a review for Nation, David L. Kirp called The Poetry of Healing a great memoir by an "unknown," and a welcome addition to the genre for its contrast to the autobiographies of the famous. Kirp described Campo as "living as if in a perpetual tug of war between the desire to fit in and the need to locate his own, sometimes heretical, voice. This tension figures in everything he writes." The critic most enjoyed Campo's depiction of others, such as a grieving gay Latino man determined to sleep around until infected with AIDS and an old woman who comforts Campo when he is unable to tell her that there is a lump in her breast. The heart of the book, according to Kirp, is the essay about the author's time spent with Gary Fisher, a gay poet dying of AIDS in the hospital. The book's weakness was identified as the "self-indulgent" portrayals of his parents and lover. Kirp reflected, "Good resumes don't necessarily make for interesting memoirs. . . . The power of a memoir has to do with how well it illuminates the particulars of a still unfinished life, and there are episodes in which The Poetry of Healing shines a clear, bright light on its subject."

In his next poetry collection, Diva, Campo delved deeper into the subject of his homosexuality and tried a new poetic endeavor, translating poems by Federico Garcia Lorca. In the Journal of the American Medical Association, Jay A. Liveson called the book Campo's "most pointed" collection to date and "a virtuoso display" of formal poetic styles including terza rimas, villanelles, pantoums, heroic couplets, and envelope quatrains. Liveson singled out the twelve prose poems of "Baby Pictures" for comment, saying, Campo "weaves a pattern portraying the implication of birth both in the literal and metaphorical sense. . . . For this work alone, I recommend this book." A Publishers Weekly review described the writings in Diva as "campy (no pun) and sometimes elegant poems." Five themes were identified in the collection: Cuban liberation, birth, relationships, illness, and the translations of Lorca's sonnets. Regarding the poet's style, the reviewer found "the poems almost always opt for sentimental pathos and imagistic reverie over reflection, yet they clearly convey the frustration and dark humor that urge them forward."

CAREER

Poet and practicing physician; Beth Israel Hospital, Boston, MA, physician; Harvard Medical School, physician.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World, Arte Publico Press (Houston, TX), 1994.
What the Body Told, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1996.
The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire (essays), W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 1997.
Diva, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1999.
The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 2003.

Also contributor to the collections The Best American Poetry, 1995; Things Shaped in Passing: Poets for Life II, Persea; and Currents from the Dancing River, edited by Ray Gonzalez, Harcourt, 1994. Campo's poetry, essays, and reviews have been published in DoubleTake, Kenyon Review, Nation, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Poetry in Review, and the Washington Post Book World.