Campo, Rafael

The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry

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A young doctor's journey of self-discovery
Breathtaking
Beautiful language, beautiful thoughts.

The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry
Rafael Campo
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Rafael Campo, the author of The Other Man Was Me and What the Body Told, is both a doctor and an important contemporary poet. In The Desire to Heal, he uses his gift for language to delineate and explicate the connections between his two vocations, writing and healing, and his roles as a gay man and an educator. Campo's topic is always the body; he understands its fragility and resistance, its power and grace. His prose is precise and poetic, and his insights are revelations. The Desire to Heal is a work of literary grace and compassion--a memoir that illuminates the world with new light and urgency.

Book Description

"Rafael Campo is that rare and exotic hybrid," raved the Boston Globe, "a doctor-poet, with a sensualist point of view that leads him to explore . . . the eroticism of healing--the laying on of hands." In this "unrelenting effort to humanize the medical profession" (Publishers Weekly), Campo turns the doctor-patient relationship inside out, writing not just of his attempts to heal, but of how his patients have healed him. He writes of campy Aurora, "dying of love"; the elderly woman telling of her trip to the country to pick "big-as-your-hands" peaches; a hateful addict he wished would die; and Gary, whom he feared to love, "contentious and gossipy and irreverent." Campo's work, "reminiscent of Chekhov . . . [in] the way language comes up out of the body" (Los Angeles Times), restores "the transcendent power of language to redeem" as, throughout the book, "the narrative, and the narrator, only get more luscious" (Out).

This book was originally published in hardcover under the title The Poetry of Healing.

Customer Reviews:

A young doctor's journey of self-discovery.......2003-06-08

I almost didn't read this book. I was expecting a discourse on the healing power of the creative arts as an alternative therapy in medicine. Campo may write about that elsewhere, but not here. If anything, the book concerns the power of poetry for the physician in need of healing.

Campo's book is part memoir, part polemic. Chiefly, it recounts his struggles to forge a single identiy as doctor, poet, Latino, and gay man. He articulates with considerable and painful clarity the many ways in which these separate identities have been in conflict. They seem finally to come together in his role as a physician to AIDS patients. But even in that there is conflict, both with the devastating nature of the disease and the efforts of managed health care to diminish his best efforts to fulfill his calling as a doctor.

As memoir, his book retraces the steps of his life journey into his profession (at the time of the book's writing he is still a young doctor, in his early 30s). We meet his Cuban-American parents, learn of his middle class suburban background, and hear of his struggles of sexual identity, which produce in him intense shame, anger and fear. We follow him to Amherst, where he meets and falls in love with a fellow med student who becomes his life partner, and from there to residency in UCSF hospital in San Francisco. He describes his bout with suspected cancer, discovered after a skiing accident. And he tells of a patient, Gary, dying of AIDS, who teaches him much about being both a doctor and a poet.

As polemic, his book argues against homophobia (even as he overcomes it in himself) and its contribution to the continuing health crisis for gay men. He argues that the catch phrase "safe sex" diminishes the fragile self-esteem and challenges the identities of gay men. He argues that modern medicine, with its reliance on technology and pharmaceuticals and insistence on professional objectivity, robs young doctors of the compassion, empathy, and desire that drew them into the profession in the first place -- and thus makes them less effective in the delivery of health care. And he argues for the legitimacy of poetry as both a practice and a guiding metaphor for the role of physician. He notes that poetry and healing are both arts; one informs and supports the other.

I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the practice of modern medicine, the training and self-education of physicians, and journeys of self-discovery. It is especially affirming in its embrace of same-sex affection, love, and passion. As companion volumes, I recommend two other books: Richard Rodriguez' memoir "Hunger of Memory" and Abraham Verghese's account of his experience as an AIDS doctor, "My Own Country."

Breathtaking.......2001-08-10

Eloquent, honest, beautiful. It's obvious Campo is a poet at heart, and that he brings his poet's sensibility to his life as a physician. Although the details of this book are personal and particular (his Cuban heritage, life as a gay man, experiences caring for AIDS patients at the height of the epidemic), Campo's observations are universal.

Beautiful language, beautiful thoughts........1999-07-22

As a pre-med student, this book caught my interest because of its focus on the side of medicine that is internal to the physician: the medicine that works in a physician's heart and mind. Campo gives a poetic and well-constructed testimony of his struggles and triumphs in reconciling his personality with the world around him and the difference between simply wanting to practice medicine and having a "desire to heal." I definitely recommend this to anyone with an intense desire to see the humanity of a field that is so often seen as something sterile and impersonal.

The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World

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The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World
Rafael Campo
Manufacturer: Arte Publico Press
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Binding: Paperback

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National Poetry Series winner, gay Latino

The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry

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The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry
Rafael Campo
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0393057275

Book Description

A celebrated poet and doctor connects—through favorite verses and stories from his life and practice—poetry and healing.

As a respected and much-loved doctor, Rafael Campo shares favorite poems with patients on his rounds. After all, incantation has played a role in healing for millennia, displaced only recently by modern scientific obsessions.

In this luminous book, Campo restores the link between poetry and healing, offering "pharmaceutical" samples of work by a diverse group of poets such as Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, Miroslav Holub, Audre Lorde, Lucia Perillo, and William Carlos Williams. He leads us through the stages of illness and recuperation, from first inklings of mortality through symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment, and finally recovery or—and here medicine recoils but poetry perseveres—death, and even immortality.

Amazon.com

Rafael Campo skillfully plays the rules of formal poetry against themselves in his second book of poetry, the Lambda Award-winning What the Body Told. In these intense poems, the body tells its story of loneliness and perseverance in an unwavering voice. One might expect the confessional poetry of a gay Cuban American poet to strike out in an expansive, perhaps enthusiastic mode, but Campo discovers in the sonnet plenty of room to explore questions of sexual, cultural, and professional identity. Five sonnet sequences--"Canciones de la Vida," "Canciones de la Muerte," and "Ten Patients, and Another"--form the heart of the book. These recall and try to answer each other's agonizing investigations into AIDS, desire, and the ironic distance between doctor and patient. Although the speaker is generally involved in the dramatic situation, he tends to speak as an observer, limning the assumptions below the surface and exploding them with fury. In other parts of the book, Campo synthesizes two traditions of formal poetry--the elegiac and the erotic--to create a third in such poems as "Before Safe Sex," "The 10,000th AIDS Death in San Francisco," and "Men Get the Shaft." These moving and vivid poems allow the reader to grieve for AIDS victims while simultaneously considering what it means to be healed. Despite Campo's day job--Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School--he refuses in his poems to play the healer; his evocative diagnoses, however, prescribe a schedule of gentleness, understanding, and rigor to make it through this life.

Book Description

What the Body Told is the second book of poetry from Rafael Campo, a practicing physician, a gay Cuban American, and winner of the National Poetry Series 1993 Open Competition. Exploring the themes begun in his first book, The Other Man Was Me, Campo extends the search for identity into new realms of fantasy and physicality. He travels inwardly to the most intimate spaces of the imagination where sexuality and gender collide and where life crosses into death. Whether facing a frenetic hospital emergency room to assess a patient critically ill with AIDS, or breathing in the quiet of his mother’s closet, Campo proposes with these poems an alternative means of healing and exposes the extent to which words themselves may be the most vital working parts of our bodies. The secret truths in What the Body Told, as the title implies, are already within each of us; in these vivid and provocative poems, Rafael Campo gives them a voice. Lost in the Hospital It’s not that I don’t like the hospital. Those small bouquets of flowers, pert and brave. The smell of antiseptic cleansers. The ill, so wistful in their rooms, so true. My friend, the one who’s dying, took me out To where the patients go to smoke, IV’s And oxygen tanks attached to themâ A tiny patio for skeletons. We shared A cigaratte, which was delicious but Too brief. I held his hand; it felt Like someone’s keys. How beautiful it was, The sunlight pointing down at us, as if We were important, full of life, unbound. I wandered for a moment where his ribs Had made a space for me, and there, beside The thundering waterfall of is heart, I rubbed my eyes and thought âI’m lost.â

Customer Reviews:

Powerful songs of suffering.......1997-04-23

The poems in this collection are powerful and intimate. Although the organization of the book could be tighter, Compo's poem address the devastating effects of AIDS and cancer on patients. Compo brings the reader into the world of the sick and reminds me that beyong our own fear of cancer and AIDS is the power of empathy. When Compo shows me the raw emotions of an woman on the edge of death, I am reminded of life and what it means to live

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CANDID EROTICISM
CANDID EROTICISM

Diva
Rafael Campo
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Rafael Campo seems to have recognized early on that, like William Carlos Williams, his work as a physician gives him entry into what Williams called "the secret gardens of the self." No wonder Campo's best poetry has always drawn on his knowledge of the human body and his informed compassion for the sick. But if the ghost of Williams hovers over the pages of Diva, so does that of Walt Whitman, with his life-affirming philosophy of connection and brotherhood, and his joyous acceptance of the flesh.

Campo's third collection is arranged in five sections, the first drawing an imaginative map of Cuba and the poet's conflicted feelings toward his paternal homeland. In "The Dream of Loving Cuba," he writes: <blockquote> It's half-erect
beneath America on all my maps--
just look at how it wants me, shamelessly,
a geographic urge that can't be helped,
a crime of nature, both a heretic and ever faithful to its needs.
</blockquote> Indeed, Campo is often strongest when describing experiences beyond his own, whether the subject is pre-revolutionary Cuba, motherhood, or slow death from AIDS. His is the voice from the bedside, the voice of the interested onlooker. This capability serves him well in "Baby Pictures," a long prose poem on maternity, in which childbirth becomes a metaphor for every sort of origin. Sometimes, however, he appears to view womanhood in the Latin manner, as an exotic and unfortunate condition (see his poem on the great, lost Audre Lorde.) Even in "The Pelvic Exam," in which the narrator-cum-doctor explores a teenage girl's pelvic cavity for signs of cancer, his empathy seems to be at war with his horror of being penetrated, of passivity: "At first the tears that drop are half-controlled. / Abnormal bleeding after periods / Has made her pain's unwilling centerfold."

The book ends with Campo's fluid, admirable translations of Lorca's queer-themed Sonnets of Dark Love. The author also adds a note about Lorca's influence on his own work, explaining that he spent years "trying to make my English sound like Spanish, that elusive inner language of my lost childhood in Latin America." Whether he's succeeded in this bit of linguistic cross-pollination is hard to gauge. But in his frequent use of rhyme and his gift for observing his immediate environment, Campo has undoubtedly produced a satisfying, accessible body of work, which has won him a pair of Lambda Literary Awards and a nomination for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award. The poems in Diva, especially the title poem à clef on adolescent clarity and angst, should only extend his considerable audience. --Regina Marler

Book Description

A major new work from one of America’s most acclaimed younger poets, Rafael Campo’s Diva appears at the intersection of confession and confinement, hyperbole and humility. In his masterful third collection, Campo explores further the epic themes of his Cuban heritage and America’s newness, his work as a doctor caring for AIDS patients and his identity as a gay man. At once relishing and resisting the poetic traditions of formal English verse, Diva showcases Campo moving deftly between received forms and free verse. In each poem the sound of words is transformed into the highest of arts, the act of performance into the exercise of power, and the most profound abjection into the sweet promise of divinity. Culminating with his new and daring translations of Federico GarcÃa Lorca’s sonetosâthe great Spanish poet’s most homoerotically explicit and formally accomplished poemsâCampo’s music instills in the reader an exalted understanding of beauty, suffering, and, ultimately, the human capacity for empathy. From reviews of Campo’s previous poetry: âExtraordinary meditations on illness and the healing power of words.ââLambda Literary Foundation âRead Campo to enter the bloodstream of a man who, with a haunting clarity of vision, shares his memories, his anguish, his healing love.ââCortney Davis, Literature and Medicine âRiveting, provocative, and refreshingâ[this volume] is a gift to the clinician who is trying to re-invoke in his or her students the humility, compassion, and deep caring that brought us all into medicine in the first place.ââDr. Sandra L. Bertman, Annals of Internal Medicine â[Campo] listens to the sounds the body makes, but what he hears is poetry.ââZoÃ« Ingalls, Chronicle of Higher Education âPowerful and accessible.ââJonathan Jackson, Washington Blade âBemused, indelible, and heartbreaking.ââMarilyn Hacker, Out â[Campo’s] private corral of disparate words twist, torque, collide with gorgeous creative imperative.ââNomi Eve, Independent Weekly

Customer Reviews:

CANDID EROTICISM.......2000-02-04

In "Diva," Rafael Campo brings to life the issues that color the world today with bold and touching lines of poetry and prose. Campo's palpable language not only invites but envelopes the reader into his world of pain and anguish, loves and passions-- and the everyday happenstances of life in America and abroad. A doctor by profession, Campo stitches the raw realities of the medical world with the ever-impending emotional tugging that comes along with the social stigmas associated with incurable illnesses such as AIDS. Campo delicately treads on the balance between experience and observation, leading the reader to a heightened awareness of the world around her/him and an empathetic eye to those who share it.

CANDID EROTICISM.......2000-02-04

The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire

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This GLM walks on water!
Poetry: the miracle cure
A sensitive book by a gay, Latino, physician who treats AIDS

The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire
Rafael Campo
Manufacturer: W W Norton & Co Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Rafael Campo is acclaimed as an important contemporary poet on the basis of his two books of poetry The Other Man Was Me and What the Body Told. In The Poetry of Healing Campo uses his gift for language to explicate and delineate the connections between being a doctor and a poet, a writer and a healer, a gay man and an educator. Campo's topic is always the body and he understands its fragility and resistance, its power and its grace. Campo's prose is precise and poetic; his insights are revelations. The Poetry of Healing is a work of literary grace and compassion--a memoir that illuminates the world with new light and urgency.

Customer Reviews:

This GLM walks on water!.......2005-05-22

Campo has created a poetic autobiography which describes his life as a gay, Latino doctor and poet. This book exemplifies that a person can be proud of being both a person of color and gay. In addition, we can be artists, healers, and so much more. Though not as effective as Gloria Anzaldua's work, Campo still demonstrates the wonders of inhabiting multiple identities and spaces. At times, he leaves his class-privilege unexamined. Some portions are repetitive. Nevertheless, I feel fortunate that I found and read this series of essays. Knowing that a gay man of color can strive in a demanding field despite bigotry, can perform well at prestigious universities, and can have a long-term partner is quite inspirational for me.

Poetry: the miracle cure.......2000-09-07

I read Campo's poetry before I knew he was a doctor; therefore, I hope he forgives me for thinking of him as a poet first, a doctor second. But this eloquent book--and indeed, Campo's life--exemplifies the benefits of accessing both sides of one's brain, the creative as well as the analytical/scientific. At times soaring with hopefulness and at others questioning the purpose of life and pondering the darkest moments of despair, Campo writes passionately and intimately about his role in the healing arts. This calling is informed as much by his poetic genius and ability to come face to face with raw emotion, unflinchingly, as it is by his doctoral training.

Campo writes powerfully about AIDS and our relationship to the plague in a way one seldom reads: with practical guidelines, not moralistic platitudes and empty slogans. His essay "Imagining Unmanaging Health Care" is worth the price of the book.

An excellent volume of essays, full of warmth, compassion, and most of all, humanity. Campo has truly become the "warrior-physician" he aspired to be--let's hope managed care doesn't drive him from the profession.

A sensitive book by a gay, Latino, physician who treats AIDS.......1998-11-05

Dr. Campo provides a sensitive and sometimes provocative look at the life of a gay, minority, physician who treats patients suffering from the plague of the 90s, AIDS. Moreover, Dr. Campo, a true humanist and poet, discusses how his passion for medicine and writing have oftentimes seemed at odds with each other. He was able to deal with many, many issues in his life and to use both medicine and writing to heal himself, his patients, and, I believe, some of his readers. He is courageous, too, just by writing this kind of book. I couldn't have imagined a Yale-educated physician acting so "un-Ivy." But, Dr. Campo has spoken out to describe, in vivid detail, his love of medicine and of words and, most importantly, of his patients.

Book Description

In Landscape with Human Figure, his fourth and most compelling collection of poetry, Rafael Campo confirms his status as one of America’s most important poets. Like his predecessor William Carlos Williams, who was also a physician, Campo plumbs the depths of our capacity for empathy. Campo writes stunning, candid poems from outside the academy, poems that arise with equal beauty from a bleak Boston tenement or a moonlit Spanish plaza, poems that remain unafraid to explore and to celebrate his identity as a doctor and Cuban American gay man. Yet no matter what their unexpected and inspired sources, Campo’s poems insistently remind us of the necessity of poetry itself in our increasingly fractured society; his writing brings us togetherâjust as did the incantations of humankind’s earliest healersâinto the warm circle of community and connectedness. In this heart-wrenching, haunting, and ultimately humane work, Rafael Campo has painted as if in blood and breath a gorgeously complex world, in which every one of us can be found.

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The Desire to Heal: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry
Rafael Campo
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000QY3HDW

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The Enemy
Rafael Campo
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

In his fifth collection of poetry, the physician and award-winning writer Rafael Campo considers what it means to be the enemy in America today. Using the empathetic medium of a poetry grounded in the sentient physical body we all share, he writes of a country endlessly at warânot only against the presumed enemy abroad but also with its own troubled conscience. Yet whether he is addressing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the battle against the AIDS pandemic, or the culture wars surrounding the issues of feminism and gay marriage, Campo’s compelling poems affirm the notion that hope arises from even the most bitter of conflicts. That hopeâmanifest here in the Cuban exile’s dream of returning to his homeland, in a dying IV drug user’s wish for humane medical treatment, in a downcast housewife’s desire to express herself meaningfully through artâis that somehow we can be better than ourselves. Through a kaleidoscopic lens of poetic forms, Campo soulfully reveals this greatest of human aspirations as the one sustaining us all.

Sectoral labor effects of North American free trade =: TLC, los impactos laborales en sectores clave de las economias

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Sectoral labor effects of North American free trade =: TLC, los impactos laborales en sectores clave de las economias
Sidney Weintraub , Monica V. Campos , and Rafael Fernandez de Castro
Manufacturer: Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
ASIN: 0899403182

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