Rafael Campo, Contributor Spotlight

Contributor Spotlight  With the poem "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" (p. 144), Rafael Campo makes his second appearance in
Ploughshares, but he has been a friend to the journal for many years, volunteering as a staff poetry reader from 1988-92. During and since that period, Campo has established a reputation as a poet in his own right, publishing his work in magazines such as
The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, and
The Nation. Last spring, his first book,
The Other Man Was Me, was selected as a National Poetry Series winner and will be released by Arte Público Press this July. In the meantime, he graduated from Harvard Medical School and is currently a second-year resident at the University of California, San Francisco. All this, and Campo is not quite thirty years old.

Except for four years in Venezuela, Campo spent his childhood in northern New Jersey, the eldest son of a Cuban immigrant father and an Italian mother. Theirs was a close-knit, loving family, but, quite predictably, there were extraordinary pressures put on Campo to succeed. His grandfather, after escaping Franco in Spain, had been a rancher and a community leader in Cuba, supporting the revolution against Batista's corrupt regime. But once Castro took over, Campo's grandfather was thrown into jail and then had no choice but to flee the country upon his release. He worked in a New Jersey furniture factory for the rest of his life, and he saw his son, Campo's father, who had been trained as an engineer, relegated to the factory line at American Can (he rose through the ranks, and, after thirty years, is now an executive vice president). Their struggles led Campo's grandfather and father to instill a bitter pride in him; they urged him to retain the Latino culture and language they had been forced to
forsake, and at the same time they insisted that he become an exemplary American, a man of respect, a doctor.

But Campo would meet resistance in pursuit of this immigrants' dream, both externally and internally. As the only minority in school, he was routinely harassed. Consequently, Campo began trying to distance himself from his heritage, assimilating as much as he could, for instance calling himself Ralph instead of Rafael. Yet it didn't work. His classmates continued to revile not only his racial and socioeconomic otherness, but also something more amorphous, something that Campo fervently wanted to deny. "My earliest attractions were to men," he says, "and I tried desperately to exorcise it from myself. I dated girls in high school and, in many ways, was sexually aggressive with them. It had a lot to do with the machismo I was brought up with, the male/female dynamics on my father's side of the family, which was very traditionally Latino."

Not surprisingly, then, Campo's interest in writing poems as an adolescent was discouraged. Although his mother was an art teacher and Latinos in general have a strong appreciation for the arts, his family viewed Campo's poetry with alarm. They felt he couldn't afford any distractions from his studies toward being a doctor, and they thought poetry might reinforce the gay impulses he seemed to possess -- a subject they never discussed openly, because it was unthinkable. He wrote in secret. At Amherst College, as an undergraduate elective, he took a poetry workshop with Eve Sedgwick, and for the first time he found expression for his sexuality and his identity as a Latino American, and he ended up double-majoring in Neuroscience and English, but he still remained quiet about his writing. Even as he began publishing his work when he was in medical school, he kept his poetry concealed as a private avocation, for to do otherwise would have meant revealing to his family that he was gay.

Halfway through his M.D., however, Campo no longer could avoid the numerous issues he had, for so long, left unaddressed. First, he admitted to his parents his sexual preference, which they of course had difficulty accepting. The news was mitigated to some degree by the confession that Jorge Arroyo, whom they had come to know and love as Campo's friend of six years, was in fact his partner. Eventually, his parents were able to abide with Campo's homosexuality, but his next disclosure shocked them further: he was thinking of abandoning medicine and becoming a poet.

"My first year of taking care of patients in the wards was entirely disastrous," Campo explains. There was a paternalistic attitude at Harvard Medical School, which tried its best to shield third-year students from patients with serious diseases, particularly AIDS. Nonetheless, Campo saw that the HIV patients were disproportionately Latino and African American, and that most of them were gay. "I was suddenly being confronted with these issues of oppression, only now they were manifested in illness," he says. "It goes back to my efforts as an adolescent to be really American. Up to that point, wearing that white doctor's coat symbolized
whiteness to me. I didn't want to be aligned with these drug addicts, these gay men, and all the stereotypes that the medical community, which is incredibly homophobic, assigns to these people. I felt alienated from both my work and my patients. I thought I had made the biggest mistake of my life. I was in a profession that not only despised who I was, it was also beating the humanity out of me."

Miserable and demoralized, Campo decided to take a year off. He was offered the prestigious George Starbuck Poetry Fellowship at Boston University, and, more to escape medicine than to pursue poetry, he went to B.U. But studying with Derek Walcott and Robert Pinsky, he discovered his way back to medicine. "In my poems, I was finding the voices of my patients telling the story of my own life, my conflicts with my sexuality and my identity as an American. It taught me more than Harvard Medical School ever did about how to take care of people." Walcott and Pinsky -- along with Marilyn Hacker and the works of Thom Gunn -- also reinforced Campo's penchant for formal poetry, particularly the sonnet and
terza rima. "Rhyming recreated the musicality of Spanish for me, and I could really see the rhythms of the body's internal processes in those forms," Campo says. "After all, I was spending my whole day listening to people's hearts and lungs and their narratives as they told me the stories of their illnesses."

Campo was finally able to find a balance, a relationship, in his dual roles as physician and poet, and he finished his manuscript for
The Other Man Was Me before returning for his fourth year of medical school. The book is divided into three sections, exploring the immigrant experience; bilingualism; the delicacy of doctor-patient relationships, especially in the time of AIDS; and Campo's patriarchal lineage, which is covered in four sonnet sequences and extends from his grandfather to his imagined son.

These days, Campo works about eighty hours a week at the University of California, San Francisco, hospital, where his partner, Jorge Arroyo, is an ophthalmologist and where another writer, Ethan Canin, is also a resident. Campo steals time between admissions to write poems and is nearly finished with his second book. In addition, he has begun writing nonfiction, and he has published two powerful essays about the human body and healing in
The Kenyon Review. He plans to be a general internist and treat people with HIV or AIDS who don't have access to care. Ironically, being a poet, publishing a book in English, has contributed more to identifying himself as an American than being a doctor, although he has issues yet to resolve. "I'm still trying to find a way to stand alongside people and be considered an equal, somebody with a voice," he says, "and that's where I hope my book will take me."

The Other Man Was Me will be published in trade paperback on July 1 ($16.95 cloth, $8.00 paper). If you're interested in making an advance order, call Arte Público Press at 1-800-633-arte.