I would like to welcome to the microphone
Colleen Burns, who will introduce tonight's reader.
I was looking forward to being introduced as the introducer.
It sounded like very deep levels of removal.
"Blood, what better ink to write the language of the heart?"
Those words were written by tonight's guest, who
on a path as old as Apollo's, is professor, physician,
and poet, Rafael Campos.
He has an MA from Amherst, an MFA from Boston University,
an MD from Harvard Medical School,
and Dr. Campo currently teaches and practices internal medicine
at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical
Center in Boston.
Campo speaks of his childhood as a Cuban-American, son
of working class immigrants, experiencing what he has called
"fractures of difference".
So it was that he entered medical school
believing that this would allow him to hide
his ethnicity and his gayness.
In his own words, "medicine seemed perfect.
The white coat could help me look whiter,
covering up my brown skin, and the machismo of the profession
might straighten me out".
I'm happy to report he failed on both counts.
Dr. Campo is the recipient of many honors and awards,
including both a Guggenheim Fellowship, an honorary doctor
of literature degree from Amherst College,
and his work has been selected for inclusion
in Best American poetry and in Pushcart Prize anthologies.
On the way out after this, you will
find a great selection of his books on sale by our bookstore.
But I'd like to go through the titles just
to give you a feel for the range and diversity of his work.
There's a doct-- another doctor in the house.
The first book, "The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New
World", was winner of the National Poetry series
open competition.
"The Poetry of Healing", he received a Lambda
literary award for that.
"What the Body Told", another Lambda literary award.
"Diva" was a finalist for the book--
National Book Critics Circle Award.
"Landscape with Human Figure" won the gold medal
from ForeWord for the best book of poetry published
by an independent press.
And finally, "The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry",
and indeed, it's a beautiful bag of essays
on poetry and on medicine.
And it includes poetry by other poets
and some beautiful writings of his own patients.
Campo, by his own definition, is a healer--
a healer and a believer in the absolute necessity of language.
He knows how voice and narrative convey the experience
of human suffering.
He knows how poetry's soothing rhythms have their origins
in our physical bodies.
As he says, "in the ebb and flow of our breathing
and our sobbing".
He knows how poetry can kindle the healing process.
He says of the sonnet, "no other way
of writing poetry so completely mirrors what
I discover in my patients.
Occupying their physical bodies, the undercurrent of I
am's in the beating heart and in the breathing lungs.
The gorgeousness of rhyme akin to dressing up
the body in layers of clothes."
About now, somebody's going to ask if he does house calls.
During his residency in California,
he was witness to whole life histories wiped out by the AIDS
epidemic in San Francisco--
convincing him of the absolute urgency of making
poems, of telling stories.
Knowing that how we tell the story of who we are, especially
of how we suffer, is critical to our definition of being human,
of how living as a human being.
And it is in the sum of these diverse stories, we find truth.
Rafael Campo keeps telling that truth.
So please welcome this doctor to our house.