Writing, Healing, and the Rhythm of a Body: An Interview with Rafael Campo

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the latest
installment of Being Human from the
University of Pittsburgh.
This series is devoted to exploring
the humanities, their connections to
other disciplines, and their value
in the public world.
I'm Dan Kubis, assistant director of
the Humanities Center at Pitt.
My guest today is Rafael Campo,
award-winning poet and professor of
Medicine at Harvard University.
Dr. Campo characterizes his medical
training as devoted to scientific
fact and to thinking of illness in
purely physical terms.
But for him, patients are more than
collections of medical facts, and
healing involves more than diagnoses
and prescriptions.
Poetry, he says, has helped, reminds
him of this. In his essays
and nonfiction, Dr. Campo makes a
forceful argument for the value of
poetry to medicine, drawing on his
own experience to show how he has
used poetry to not only understand
his patients but also to provide
better medical care.
But he makes an even more forceful
argument in his poems, which have
now been collected in six books.
In his poetry, Dr. Campo bears
witness to the complexity of his own
experience, including the joys and
struggles of his sexuality, his
confusion as an immigrant from Cuba,
and even his doubts as a physician.
Writing poetry, he says, has played
an important role in his own quest
for healing, a lesson he now tries
to impart in weekly writing and
reading workshops for medical
students at Harvard.
I began by asking Dr. Campo about
the origins of his interests in
medicine and poetry and how the
relationship between the two has
changed over time.
I guess I would begin by saying that
I was always drawn to the work of
healing because of my
experience as an
immigrant in this country and
feeling very acutely, growing
up, a sense of fracture
or a sense of rupture between
my experience and
this homeland that
it turns out I have never been able
to visit Cuba.
And so I felt very
early on in my
imaginative life, in my intellectual
life, that there was something about
trying to repair that fracture,
trying to heal that
wound that, in some sense, could
never be healed.
That really drew me to the
work that I do now.
And so when I got to
medical school, it was surprising
to me how little
those humanistic notions
around healing were part of my
training. I was
really struck by how strictly
biomedical the training I received
was at that time.
And so, yes, when
I was writing more poetry
in the wake of that experience as
a medical student and then intern
resident and now a physician,
initially I did feel that there was
a real separation
between the humanistic,
the humane, this notion
of being a healer in a broad sense.
Healing through language,
through recounting of
stories, through articulating
pain, through language.
And this notion of being
a doctor with the white coat, which
was this, in a way, a kind
of--I came to view it as a kind of
armor, a kind of shield that,
in some sense, protected me from
the indelicacies of human suffering.
And that, in fact, what being a
doctor was, I learned at Harvard
Medical School, knowing
pathophysiology and being able to
recite 18 items on the differential
diagnosis and
being able to know what someone's
potassium level was and how many
lymph nodes were positive on the CT
scan.
That's what medicine
was really about, I learned in
medical school. And so there was
a, I think, when I came
to the page, a reluctance
to reveal
the medical world in which I found
myself. Because I
was learning at the time that the
two were supposed to be
separated. And we have an
unfortunately, a tradition in
medical education of teaching
detached concern or distancing.
That somehow,
to be engaged with the human
experience of our patients
distracts us from
the real work of
intervening and treating that
malignant arrhythmia with
shock therapy and all the kinds of
things that we do that
are, of course, very important kinds
of treatments and interventions.
So, yes, I do feel like
there was a real tension there as
I went through my medical training.
Ironically, what I learned
really I would say, during my
third year of medical school, when I
had more time actually
encountering patients, that
in fact, what I was learning in
medical school wasn't what
was most important-- certainly very
important. But I began
to recognize that what
was so central to the work of being
a doctor was actually being
present meaningfully
at the experience of my patients
suffering. And I remember getting
feedback from attendings
and my supervising
residents that I tended to identify
too strongly with my patients.
That caring
about them would cloud my judgment.
That if I ever became a
physician, it was going to be a real
problem for me if I didn't learn how
to develop a thicker skin
and be more removed,
be more distanced, be more detached.
And I remember feeling that kind
of feedback was just so damaging
because I was really struggling with
how could I be a really
authentic and genuine witness
to my patients suffering.
And so turned out that
narrative poetry
was just that
kind of opening,
that kind of connection I was
searching for because through poems,
we can, I think, be present
empathetically at another person's
suffering. We can
immerse ourselves in the voice of
another consciousness.
We can hear the metaphors that our
patients use to describe
these unspeakable
circumstances in which they find
themselves. The pain that we can't
articulate somehow we can express
through metaphor, even
perhaps imperfectly at times.
So there's a real irony in that
because I did find that as
I encountered patients, and I got
out of textbooks
and more into the clinics
and into the hospitals, that indeed
being a poet was, in some sense,
actually better training
for being a doctor.
Yeah. Well, one thing you mentioned
the kind of the interest in the
people you were studying with when
you were in medical school and kind
of keeping that apart.
Right? And not have it only focusing
on, let's say, the biophysical
aspects of being a doctor.
And one of the things that I was
surprised that in reading your work
because you mentioned it-- you
mentioned in other essays that you
have actually encountered hostility
when you present this idea at
conferences and things like that.
I was interested in the hostility.
Where does it come from?
What's your take on why
that exists?
It's not indifference, right?
That I can understand.
I mean, maybe there's some of that.
There's some of that.
There are some indifference.
But there's actually a kind of a
hostility to this being introduced
to narrative and poetry being part
of medical training and being a
significant part of it.
What are your thoughts on where that
comes from?
Yeah, that's a really interesting
question. Also, I would say that
some of it, I think, stems from,
in medicine, we are
trained to know
everything that we can know.
I mean, there's this sense of that
science can explicate everything
that there is to know about the
human body.
And when we're confronted with
mystery, when we're confronted with
the inexplicable, when we're
confronted with the end of
life, for example, when there isn't
going to be another round of
chemotherapy, there isn't going to
be another surgery to perform
where the patient's
family is looking to us, where the
patient is looking to us
and searching for a different kind
of intervention, a different kind
of connection with us.
I think we are fearful of that.
We're trained so
much to know, to
do, to intervene, to treat.
And especially, I would say,
our formative years as students is
very much, in
some sense, almost a kind of
punitive training where
if you don't know the answer, you're
humiliated publicly on rounds.
So there is a real fear,
I think, that comes out of not
knowing all the answers.
And so I
think that's part of it.
I think there's also,
I think, something
that has to do with a kind of hubris
or arrogance, again, around
the scientific enterprise.
And
we, I think, see this a little bit
in the tension between-- even at
universities, like this great
university, where the humanities
and the sciences somehow seem, in
a way, adversaries or that
these are sort of distinct ways of
knowing about the world.
And science really
gets all the funding.
Science gets all the
attention. Science gets all the
reporting in the media.
And so there's a sense
of what
does poetry have to do with this
really important work of curing
cancer. And
that disconnect, I think, also
informs it that poetry, that's
for that
sort of fluff.
That's window dressing. We have one
lecture a year on the humanities
and medicine. And
we pat ourselves on the back and
pretend we're all caring,
compassionate doctors.
And that's not to say there aren't
many, many caring, compassionate
doctors. I don't mean to doctor bash
at all, but I
do think there is a sense of what
really takes precedence in the work
of medicine and the profession of
medicine is science.
And
I think part of it has to do with,
again, money that is
directed towards these different
kinds of modes
of inquiry.
Yeah. Well, I want to ask you about
the contributions that
writing poetry and reading
poetry have made to your work
as a doctor throughout your career.
But I want to start by asking
something that I was
more surprised to hear about.
And that is kind of how it works in
the other direction, which is how
your work as a doctor has
contributed to and influenced
your work as a poet.
And you've written, or you've
talked-- I think I saw an interview
where you talk specifically about
listening to a stethoscope.
Yes, yes, yes.
And the importance of that in
writing poetry. Can you talk a
little bit about that? It's particularly
rhythm, I think, that you were you
were focusing on at that point.
It's a very important part
of poetry for you, is a rhythm of
poetic language.
Absolutely. That is a really
important connection for me.
I think that-- I spend most
of my day listening to the heart
through my stethoscope.
And so the innate rhythms
of the body really do find
their way into my poems.
I'm very interested in formal
structures, in poetry, metrical
figures, iambic
meters, in particular.
And my ear is just
always trained to
those innate rhythms of our body.
And so that's one way I
feel very much this physical
connection between the work I do
as a physician and
the poem, which is,
I think, of all the modes of writing
I love, I
think is the most physically
embodied in many respects.
And so there's that.
I would say also there's
also this notion of listening to
the stories of my patients and
being present as someone struggles
to describe
pain or struggles to describe
depression.
The sense of language as
an inadequate and
yet, at the same time, the only
container we have for these
very, very difficult
emotions. And so I love
how poems allow
us to feel
those kinds of tensions much
more so than other modes of writing,
I think.
There is this sense of the container
of the poem. There is the structures
against which the poet
is exerting to
create the voice of the speaker in
the poem. So
there's that kind of
tension as well that I think,
in some ways, is particular
to poetry.
And then, I guess, I might say also
that in a kind of a
even larger sense that
I find that in my work as
a doctor, that
presenting narratives, presenting
stories of people who have actually
lived the experience of illness can
make for change.
Many
have reflected on
art's and poetry's inability to
change the world.
And I find that in
medicine, there is nothing more
compelling to certainly my students,
my residents, even many of my
colleagues than to hear the
story of someone's experience
of an illness that was
impacted by
an aspect of his or
her identity or a sense of
because I am in some
sense different, I couldn't access
this treatment, or I couldn't find
my way to the neurology clinic
because all the signs are in English
and I only speak Spanish.
These stories of what
it means to live with an illness
can really, I think, illuminate
some of the health disparities that
are still plaguing
our country.
And so I think also
in that sense,
poetry writing
can animate
the experience of illness
for diverse people in a way that
can make all of us
understand better what that
experience is.
Yeah. And I wonder, too, to
think about your work as a poet for
a moment more.
You've written about poetry
and kind of the detachment
that you see in kind of experimental
poetry and abstract poetry.
And it struck me in thinking about
and listening to you now talk about
bodily rhythms that actually,
in terms of the kinds of poetry that
you produce, your work as a doctor
keeps a physical presence in your
poems.
That kind of works against what you
see as a kind of like a certain
trend in contemporary poetry
of being abstract and experimental
and less available for a wider
public.
Yes. Yes.
I have, in some
sense, I think evolved a little bit
on
that particular theme.
But I do find that my
own attraction
to the poem, really, is through
the more physically embodied
rhythms, again,
the notion of
a poetry that is, in some
sense, visceral, that
enters us through physical
channels as well as through our
mental faculties.
And again, that's very much the
experience I have of-- I
was just talking over lunch - this
is going to sound weird. Only a
doctor poet would say this, I guess
- but percussing the liver
and hearing
the difference between
the resonance of the chest cavity
and the dullness of this
internal organ.
And so yeah.
So those are not
abstract notions, in my
experience. Those are real
expressions of our bodies
and how we perceive, also how we
can sound out, how we can
suss out the body.
And so that's, again, a maybe
more a particular fascination of
mine than a kind of a critique of
the other kinds of poetry that are
out there and that are, I think,
interesting for other kinds of
reasons.
This kind
of line of thinking about your work
also reminds me of William Carlos
Williams, who it's hard not to
think of you in dialogue with
because of your histories as doctor
poets from New Jersey. But also
because of a focus on we think
of Williams, and we think of No
Ideas But in Things and a focus
on that. And some of the ways that
you've written about illness brings
us always back to things, right?
Thinking about illness as urine
that you need to dispose of,
thinking of illness as blood that's
escaping from a wound, and things
like that. And you write about
Williams and your relationship to
him in The Healing Art.
Can you say a little bit about what
he's meant to you as someone you've
read?
Oh my gosh, well, where could I
begin? I mean, he's one of my
heroes. And as you say, he was
a primary care doctor, what we
would call a primary care doctor
now, in an
impoverished part of New Jersey,
not far from where I grew up,
actually. And so, yes,
he's always been this really
hero figure for me in many ways.
And his effort
to, I think, express
what he saw in his day-to-day
work as a physician,
this notion of a kind of a
democratic idiom, this notion
of the disturbed body, the
ill body
as one to
which applies
to all of us, really, that someday
we're all going to be patients.
Every single one of us is going
to be in that hospital bed one of
these days. And so
I think one of
the impulses behind his
project, which really, I think,
transformed American poetry
in such important ways, was this
sense of we share
an idiom that's based in
our bodies. But that's also an
expression of our sensuality,
our physicality,
as well as our shared experience
as Americans. And Americans
in that very plural
sense of he was taking care
of immigrants. He was taking care of
the poor. He was taking care of
anybody who walked through his door.
And so
there's something really, again,
heroic, I think, in his joining
of these two
vocations, I would say and
has really served as just
an inspiration to my
own work. And so I
think, yes, that indeed there is
this way in which Williams
and his work reflect how
stories, language
emanates from
us in a way that is
truly universal
and again,
anti-elitist, anti
this sort of poetic
sort of jargon.
Sometimes I have colleagues who say,
"Oh, poetry," it's especially,
again, in medicine, "that's all
code language, and I can't
understand it." And it's like,
why don't you just say it?
But that's what Williams did.
He did say it. He was trying
to say it. And again, this
just incredible
American idiom that
everybody could understand.
And that was accessible to all of
us, not in the sort of elitist
language of what
came from Europe, shall we say.
So that's part of
my obsession, fascination
with Williams.
Maybe I said too much about that.
I'm sorry.
No, not at all. I mean, I'm
interested in asking one further
question about that, because he--
and you mentioned this a few times
in your response. I mean, he
certainly saw his project as an
American one. And he was responding
to T.S.
Eliot. He was responding to Ezra
Pound.
I mean, you were saying coming through,
these are Americans who went to
Europe. People he knew.
He knew Pound when he was at
the University of Pennsylvania.
And you mention a few times there
being an Americaness to his project.
Do you see your project in that way
as being American poetry?
I hope so. I mean, I feel like I am
maybe perhaps a little bit different
from Williams, although he had
Puerto Rican roots.
But I see myself
as almost
as perhaps one of the kinds of
patients he treated
being an immigrant or from an
immigrant family to this country.
And so, yes, I
see America as this
plurality of voices as
a nation of immigrants, as a place
where the American
dream inspires so many people
to come to
seek education, to seek opportunity.
And so, yes, I
do think that my own work, and I
hope, in some sense, my life
is really an expression of that,
I think, fundamentally
American idea,
which I know
drew my parents here.
And I hope I'm, in some sense,
a kind of a product of their
optimism, of their dreams.
They came here with nothing and
taught us,
all of us, my brothers and my
sister, the importance of an
education, the importance of
service, the importance of giving
back to a society that had given
them so much. And so
I think, yes, that's distinctly
American. And I see
America every day in my practice.
My patients are all
of us in every sense of
that diversity,
which I guess, in some ways, now has
almost a
kind of, I don't know, shorthand
meaning now. But I
experience that every day in my
clinic. And it's just
absolutely beautiful
and astonishing, and
I think really exists
only in a country like this.
Well, I want to ask a little bit
about contributions that you feel
that poetry has made to your
practice as a doctor and as a
physician.
And I want to ask to try to be as
specific as possible.
In the beginning of The Healing Art,
there is a really-- this
is your second book of prose.
And there's a really powerful
example of a patient that you
called Daniel in the beginning.
And you talk about the fact that his
symptoms of depression had not
responded to treatment, a variety of
different treatments, and that it
was only after you
learned that he had been abused
in a church as a child
that you were able to intervene more
effectively.
And I want to be as clear as
possible in saying that the way
that it's not that
you learned the fact of his being
abused. It's that you read his
poetry. And you say very
specifically you experienced
the shame of the speaker that
these events inspired.
You experienced the violence of the
events. And it's specifically the
encounter with the poetry, not
learning a fact on a
bullet point or something like that
but reading the poetry itself, that
allows you to intervene more
effectively.
And I wonder if you could say a
little bit about how that
experience.
What it let you do
that you wouldn't have been able to
do otherwise, and why that was more
effective in that case?
Yeah. So those are also great
questions. I would say, in a number
of ways-- I think, in that
particular case, because there are
so many silences
around abuse for
many people who have experienced
abuse, that the
poetry that he wrote and the poems
he shared with me allowed
a kind of connection around
that experience that I don't think
would have been possible through the
standard sort of medical interview.
It seemed to me at the time that he
could only express what had happened
to him through that particular
medium. And so, in
a very real sense, it opened up
an opportunity, in a way,
to offer support,
resources, treatment
that I might not never have even
known about that he needed.
And so in that
very, I think, practical
sense. But also,
I think, and this is maybe
perhaps a more sort of aesthetic or
maybe even sort of philosophical
notion. But I think poetry really
does allow us to speak
the unspeakable.
It is a container
of
the most difficult kinds of emotions
I think that we
can feel. And whether they're
shame, pain,
the kinds of suffering
that often attend the
experience of illness, or whether
they're also ecstatic experiences,
whether they're experiences of
unspeakable joy.
This is why we
turn to
not only poetry but to
music, to art.
These are ways in which we can
express these experiences
that,
again, I find are
physically engaging.
The way that the hair on the back of
our necks stands up when we when
we see an image that, again,
we can't articulate
exactly
what it says to us or how it speaks
to us. But yet, we are moved
in a way that, again, allowed me to
be much more present
in Daniel's particular
case than
had I been in my
more sort of standard
position of the doctor in the white
coat with my detached concern and
perhaps more objectively
interviewing him and seeking
information about what was
going on in terms of symptoms and
pain on the 1 to 10 scale that we
use. And there
was this opportunity--
more than an opportunity, this demand
that I
engage with him, that I
connect empathetically with him.
And there has been much written
about the healing
possibilities of empathy in the
psychiatric and mental health
literature. But I think there really
is, again, perhaps
this getting back to a more
practical way
of thinking about it. But indeed, I
think empathy does allow
us to form
healing connections with
our patients that are part of
the therapeutic
intervention, if you will, that's
simply listening.
And there are even studies from the
primary care setting that
doctors who spend more time
listening to their patients
are not only
rated more highly by their patients
in terms of the quality of care that
the patients receive but
also the outcomes of the patients--
better
outcomes in terms of blood pressure,
in terms of
what endpoints
we can more or less objectively
measure. Not that
I think all of this should be
quantitatively
assessed, but
the poet in me bristles a little in
trying to say this
but--
It's one benefit, but it doesn't
have to be the only one.
It's not the only one.
It's one benefit that we can
measure. And it is actually
useful to speak to
my medical colleagues in that in
their language of randomized
controlled trials or
that kind of data. But, yes, there's
much, much data to
suggest that the empathetic
relationship, the therapeutic
alliance itself, is
healing for patients.
So, yes, I think that transformed
the care that I was able to provide
Daniel. And, in some sense,
he wrote to me some years ago
after we
worked together. He moved
to another city. But he wrote to me,
and he said to me later that, "I
think being able to engage with you
through my poems really saved my
life." And it was an extraordinary
thing to hear so many years later
from someone
who was very troubled at that time.
In that case, it was only after
a long relationship
with him that he gave you the poems.
I mean, that particular example is
one where it took a long time.
And it took, I think, if I remember
correctly, a suicide attempt on his
part in order to get
to the point where he--
He could.
He was sharing these poems with you.
How do you work to cultivate
those kinds of relationships
in other cases where
you may not have the same amount of
time, where you may not have the
same amount of conditions?
How do you work as a doctor to try
to cultivate those kinds of
relationships with patients in a
variety of settings?
Yes. Well, I do often invite
my patients. Most of the care I
give is through my primary care
clinic. And so, I have longitudinal,
long-term relationships with most
of my patients. But even when I'm
attending on the wards, for example,
and my interactions with patients
may be more constrained to that
particular space
in the hospital, there are
many ways in which engaging
narratively with patients
can be really powerful.
When I'm rounding with my students
and residents, I always ask patients
to tell me a story about why are
you famous?
Tell me a story about who
you are outside of the hospital.
And it's extraordinary the kinds of
things that people will say
in response to that very simple
question that
changes the perspective of the
entire team caring for someone,
for example, with substance
use problems who,
I would say, of all the populations
of patients we care for are often
the most sort of dismissed or
denigrated. There
are so many kinds of bias against
people struggling with addiction in
the hospital. And
when we ask-- sometimes I'll ask a
patient who's struggling with
addiction to
tell me about the first time you
used? Tell me what that was like.
What were you doing?
What was your life like then?
And again, these stories
open up and are so
powerfully humanizing that
all the stereotypes of, "Oh, that
junkie, that dirtbag,"
are just completely challenged.
So those are a couple of, again,
sort of off the top of my head,
examples of how even in a very busy
hospital
ward setting, that just simply
taking a few minutes to hear the
patient's story can make a
tremendous difference in how we see
that person. So suddenly,
they're not the shooter
with endocarditis
and HIV and Hepatitis C.
They're the young mother who was
desperate and made certain--
Made a series of decisions.
Individual reasons that brings a
person to that point instead of
being a category.
Exactly. And they're not the category
anymore. And that's just
incredibly powerful.
Well, I want to ask
you a question about
your writing about AIDS because
that's been something that you've
done for so long.
It's been such an important part of
your career, writing in your
essays and also your poetry.
One of the things that I really
enjoyed about reading your work is
that it brought me to Susan Sontag's
essays Illness as Metaphor
and then also AIDS and Its
Metaphors. Really, I know those are
important works to you.
And they were very powerful and
illuminating for me too.
In Illness
as Metaphor, she's writing that in
the late seventies, and she writes
about cancer.
She's talking about kind of the
cultural life of cancer
and comparing it to tuberculosis.
And she writes about cancer
at the time being unsuitable for
poetry. You can't aestheticize it.
It's obscene, she says.
Right? We can't speak about it.
I got the sense reading
that and then
reading you writing about AIDS that
that was roughly your
experience of AIDS, especially
in the early years. That it was
something that wasn't supposed to be
talked about and couldn't be talked
about for a variety of reasons,
different maybe than cancer.
Can you talk about
that a little bit like you were
especially writing about AIDS,
poetry and prose, especially in
the earlier years of your writing
about it?
Yes, absolutely.
I remember very clearly
being a resident
at UCSF, University of
California San Francisco, at
what was really, I think, the
sort of peak of the AIDS
epidemic here in the United States.
And I remember people
in the streets with these signs and
chanting "silence = death" and
this notion that
indeed, our words
potentially could save
lives. And so
to go from this notion of this
highly stigmatized,
shaming disease, that was a
punishment from God, that was a
punishment for being queer,
that was going to inevitably
lead to a painful,
horrifying death to
this humanized notion of
communities grappling with
how can we survive plague?
How can we
live through this
crisis that was
killing young men my age?
I mean, when I was on
the hospital wards,
rounding every morning
during that time in my life,
18 of the 20 patients I
was caring for at a
given time were all men my age
dying of AIDS.
We had nothing we could offer to
treat them.
So I became, again, very, I think,
acutely aware of how
our words could save us.
Not only were they a call to
community, a call to action,
but they were also, I
think, a way of remembering, in
a way, immortalizing those who
were dying, for whom we had no
treatments. But we had our stories.
We had poetry.
We had this opportunity to
be galvanized as
a community and to
fight for change.
And I would say
that those poems and those stories
that came out of the HIV
epidemic, and that still
are being written, are still being
told, did
actually, in some ways, practically
change the course of the epidemic.
And we have treatment
now for HIV and AIDS.
It's not available to everybody, but
we have treatments that
save lives now
that we couldn't even imagine then.
And so,
yes, I think part
of my misgivings at that time
about writing about
this just absolutely
harrowing
crisis had to do with the
notion of not wanting to
sort of monumentalize or
aestheticize, or make some
sort of beautiful object out of
suffering. That was
troubling to me. But then, as I was
saying, I recognize that what
these activists, what these poets,
what these teachers, what
these community
leaders were trying to do was not to
monumentalize or
sugarcoat or to
prettify what was happening but was
to really sustain
us as a community.
And to, again,
I experienced it so much more as
a kind of call to action, which is
the kind of objection I have with
some of Sontag's arguments.
When
she says that, for example,
that our superstitions and our
negative metaphors in the
way we think about illness are
actually harmful to people who are
ill.
I get that.
But what I think sometimes
she neglects
is that there are also positive
metaphors, hopeful metaphors
that come out of the
experience of illness that are
inspiring, that make
change, that bring people together
in community.
And again, I think, certainly in the
case of HIV/AIDS, but I think also
in the world of cancer and in other
realms, actually, really do save
lives. And
so I think it's a little more
complicated than what Sontag
puts forward in some of her
arguments that not all metaphoric
thinking, not all art that's
made about the experience of illness
reflects these kinds of negative
stereotypes that we have.
And yes, there are many of those
that-- of course, the romanticized
notion of tuberculosis, as this
way that
effete gentleman died and
sort of wasted away.
And the poets and artists-- or
that we get cancer because we have
internalized rage or
that we get AIDS because we've
sinned in some sense or another.
Those negative metaphors are
potentially, I think, destructive.
But, again, I think she
doesn't register that
some imaginative thinking about
illness and some art and
poetry and other responses
to the experience of illness are
actually hopeful and are actually
empowering.
But I think that
it's really interesting what
she has to say about illness
in those two essays that you mention
there. I recommend them highly to
everybody who is thinking about
these questions.
Yeah. Well, I wonder, thinking about
your writing about AIDS, in
particular, in the early years.
Would you be willing to read one or
two poems, particularly an early
one?
The one that you got there is the
10,000th AIDS Death in San
Francisco. And this is from an
early collection of yours, What the
Body Told.
This is a blast from the past.
Maybe I could read this and then
contrast it with one that's more
recent about the same theme
because--
That would be great.
there's been such evolution in
how we take care of people with
AIDS.
This is from 1996-- a collection
that was put out in 1996 but written
earlier.
Yes. Yes. Written earlier in 1993.
So this was written on the occasion
of the 10,000th AIDS death in San
Francisco.
"A woman hurried past me in the
street today, reminding me
it's not a dream.
While eating an expensive lunch in
some expensive Caribbean restaurant,
I keep imagining is Cuban-owned.
I notice that I keep imagining
the AIDS ward where I saw
a man my age die yesterday.
I can't say why, but when
he looked at me, I wanted him to
kiss my face.
I wanted him to live with me
and tell me stories.
Stories 17 or 18
hours long involving
sex beneath the stars
or with celebrities beneath some
perfect, countless stars.
About the days
before the epidemic killed so many
thousand people.
Wanting him to live, I
stood erect beside the bed,
wanting him.
The sex itself was great, I'm sure.
But what I'd really like to know was
how it felt to know that after
a lunch, in some expensive
restaurant, your friends would
be alive.
Your friends would be alive.
To know no
friend would die like that
of cryptococcal meningitis,
or another kind of meningitis
or a lung infection so severe
it makes a kiss impossible
because the need to breathe is even
greater.
Hurriedly, I paid the bill
because I need to breathe, and
suddenly, I'm seeing stars.
I see myself outside some
Cuban restaurant.
A woman hurries past me,
frowning.
Far."
Thanks so much.
Do you want to-- and do you want to
go on the-- another poem we have
with us is Recent Past Events, which
is a more recent work
from your most recent collection,
Alternative Medicine.
If you don't mind, maybe I would
read it just because the contrast
between the two is, I think, maybe
worth reflecting on a little bit and
how things have changed and
have not changed, actually.
So this is from a much more
recent collection, Recent
Past Events.
"It wasn't so miraculous back then.
Some said we had their blood on our
prim hands.
We were ashamed of our good
appetites.
We marched together in gay pride
parades.
We feared their blood.
We prayed for it to end.
We learned the names of lands in
Africa.
Botswana, Ghana,
Tanzania, Chad.
We adopted universal precautions.
We prayed for it to end.
We feared their blood.
We were afraid to call our parents,
who we knew would think the worst.
We learned to speak in acronyms.
We watched two women kiss on
television late one night.
We cried.
We handed out free condoms in
the fens.
Remember when it seemed miraculous
that most of our close friends
weren't dead?
We feared their blood.
We were ashamed.
We went on trips to Africa.
We saw a leopard kill an antelope.
We saw the vast red dunes Namibia
is famous for.
We cried at patients' funerals.
We handed out clean needles in the
fens.
We feared their blood.
We touched each other carefully at
night, remembered when it felt
miraculous.
Remember when his cheekbones didn't
shut out so much?
We had their blood on our
clean hands.
We were ashamed of living while they
died.
We cooked for friends.
We prayed for it to end.
We traveled to Peru, New
Zealand, France.
We bungee jumped from cliffs.
We sipped red wine.
We shopped for clothes that fit us
well.
We watched the president announce
more funds.
We cried.
We were ashamed of our good
appetites.
We watched two women kiss outside
the door of our favorite Chinese
restaurant.
We talked about adopting kids.
We feared what people thought of us.
We bought a house.
We painted the back bedroom red
like blood.
We gave less money to the charities.
We found a nice church that accepted
us.
The stained glass windows seemed
miraculous.
We ate our dinner.
We remembered how we feared their
blood, and how we prayed
for it to end and
how it never really did."
Thanks so much.
I wonder if you just would be
willing to reflect on those two
poems and thoughts that you have
now, reading them and
thinking about your
poems that you've written on this
subject and others.
Yes. Well, I
can't help but mark
the incredible distance
we've traveled in
caring for people with HIV and AIDS.
But at the same time, how
little things have changed in
some ways. I
think that
I actually wrote the second poem
after I gave a--
it was a reading on World AIDS Day,
actually, at a liberal arts
college I love very much.
That's very much like my alma mater,
Oberlin College.
And one of the students who
organized this wonderful event came
up to me afterward and said,
"Well, it's so great that you're
still writing about HIV and AIDS
because now that we have a cure and
it's just really important that
someone still is writing about
this disease." And
I was just so taken aback
by this
comment that we had
a cure for AIDS.
And it made me reflect on that.
In biomedicine, we tend to
overhype all of our advances and
all of our technologies.
And,
again, we do have amazing
treatments that weren't available
even ten years ago for people with
HIV and AIDS. But, at
the same time, there are still 40
million people on this planet who
have HIV infection.
And most of them are going to die of
AIDS because they don't have access
to these miraculous
treatments. And so
it was a moment for me to reflect
back on the time
of 1993 when
we didn't have any treatment at all.
And yet, how
we think we
have, in some ways, solved
this crisis
through science.
Again, I think
we still have need for
poems that speak
in some sense to the
ongoing truths of an epidemic
that rages on, and that
is killing people
in Africa, in particular, but in
other parts of the world
without these treatment.
So, yes,
things have changed in San
Francisco, perhaps, but
they haven't yet changed
everywhere.
Yeah. Well, one of the features
of the second poem that you read
that stands out to me very much
is the vary in kinds of
collectivities signaled by the "we."
There's "We adopted universal
precautions" is a very different
"we" then "we travel to
Africa," for example.
We adopted kids.
Yes.
Yeah.
So that, to me,
is a question about politics
that is raised through your poem.
Right? The relationship between
these different sizes of groups of
people.
And so, I wonder if we could finish
by me asking you about
the last essay in The Desire to
Heal, which to me, is the essay of
yours where you address the
politics of being a poet and being
a doctor most directly.
It was inspired by a conversation
you had by a dean
at Harvard Medical School who
suggested that, in your future
career, you would want to give back
to your community or the community
or whatever. But the essay is
about complicating that suggestion
and about giving and the
various ways that people can give--
about communities and the various
kinds of communities that any one
person is in.
And you finish the essay talking a
little bit about poetry and its
relationship for you to all of this,
how complicated that is.
So I wonder if we could finish this
part, at least,
with you just reflecting a little
bit on poetry and
giving and poetry as giving.
And what
that makes you think of in terms of
how poetry has worked for you
in your career as a poet, as
a doctor, and as a person.
Wow. Well,
I could spend a lot of time
answering that question, but I'll
try to be more brief, I
think. My goodness, yes.
Poetry has, I think, extraordinary
power, I think to join us
empathetically, as we were saying
earlier. And I can't think
of any form
of service, of
giving of oneself that is
perhaps more
powerful, more
meaningful than
the way I think
souls can sort
of touch each other through the
experience of sharing
a story, sharing a poem.
And so, in that very sort of
personal sense, I think
poetry is this
conduit to giving
of oneself and giving
not only one's fullest
attention through the
empathetic
joining that I just described,
but also, I think
giving of one's
sense of self
that I think--
again, in medicine,
we so often regard our patients
as the sum of their problem
lists. And we don't
recognize the person
sitting there with us in the clinic,
sitting there in that
flimsy paper gown, who
has a whole life narrative
that isn't just
another case of breast cancer, that
isn't just another HIV
diagnosis.
There's a whole particular story
in each of those
person's experiences that
we often neglect.
And so, I think
in that way, poetry and, again,
being attentive to the
poetry of my patients
stories has
really given me, I think,
the opportunity to be a more
effective, more present,
more compassionate - I hope -
healer in a broad sense.
And I think
this notion also of community that
you mentioned I think
poetry also is
because of the way in which
I think it really does call
us together, perhaps
more so than any other kind of
written art form, because it is also
spoken. And we join
together in the experience of
voice
through poetry.
And so I think
that's another way in which poetry
gives all of us this opportunity
to be
really more present to one another
and to be joined in shared
experience, to be, as I said a
little bit earlier, immersed in
another person's voice
instead of in our little
kind of tiny screens and
our own sort of echo chambers of
technology-induced
disconnection.
Although I know we're in a smaller
and smaller world, I sometimes
wonder if we are becoming, in some
ways, more
disjoint from each other through
these technologies.
So I
think those are some of the ways in
which poetry
gives.
And I
think it's really-- I can't imagine
doing my work every day
without poetry present in my life.
Dr. Campo, thank you so much.
Thank you.
That's it for this edition of Being
Human.
This episode was produced by Matt
Moret, Undergraduate Media Fellow at
the University of Pittsburgh.
Stay tuned next time when my guest
will be Rudolph Ware, director of
the Islamic Knowledge Research
Initiative at the University of
Michigan.
Thanks for listening.

In collections

Being Human Podcast Recordings

Order Reproduction
Title
Writing, Healing, and the Rhythm of a Body: An Interview with Rafael Campo
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh (depositor)
Campo, Rafael (interviewee)
Kubis, Dan (interviewer)
Date
June 2, 2017
Identifier
20230127-beinghuman-0020
Description
An interview with Rafael Campo, award-winning poet and professor of medicine at Harvard University. The interview focuses on Professor Campo's life and career, particularly his belief that poetry has an important role to play in providing effective medical care.
Extent
50 minutes
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh. Department of English
Type
sound recording-nonmusical
Genre
interviews
Subject
Poetry--Health aspects
Social medicine
Campo, Rafael
Source
Being Human
Language
eng
Collection
Being Human Podcast Recordings
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh
Rights Information
In Copyright. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).. Rights Holder: University of Pittsburgh
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Rights Holder
University of Pittsburgh

Primary tabs

Writing, Healing, and the Rhythm of a Body: An Interview with Rafael Campo

In collections