Formal Matters in Contemporary Latino Poetry

F. Aldama

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780230391642
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Today's Latino poetry scene is incredibly vibrant. With original interviews, this is the first meditation on the thematic features of such poetry. Looking at how Julia Alvarez, Rhina Espaillat, Rafael Campo, and C. Dale Young use structures such as meter, rhyme, and line break, this study identifies a poetics of formalist Latino poetry.

Chapter 1

Rafael Campo

Campo as Maker

Rafael Campo (1964–) is many things. He is a New Jersey–born Latino (Cuban father and Italian American mother), a gay man, a father, a doctor—and a maker of poetry. After graduating from Amherst College he took classes in creative writing at Boston University while attending Harvard Medical School. He currently writes poetry and practices medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard’s teaching medical school campus. He has published seven volumes of poetry: The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World (1994); What the Body Told (1996); The Desire to Heal: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Poetry (1997); Diva (1999); Landscape with Human Figure (2002); The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry (2003); and The Enemy (2007).

In an interview with Christopher Hennessy, Campo emphatically cites the Modernist poetic movement’s objective: “To Make New!”1 While Campo is not a Modernist poet in the spirit of a Baudelaire nor an Apollinaire, an H.D., or a Mayakovsky by any stretch, his compositions evince a careful use of form and device to make new the reader’s senses, emotions, and thoughts of and about the everyday. To make new, Campo does not experiment so much with technique (semantic, visual, or aural) but rather with form—and this without giving up conventions of traditional verse such as meter, rhyme, and syllabic stress, for instance. That is, he cuts or segments lines and stanzas in ways that ask his readers to look at and feel anew “quotidian subject matter” such as parenting, cooking, dying—even “two men fucking.”2 Campo handles his tools with care. He also relishes in the ways they can be used to press “up against these [poetic] rules and regulations” as a means to “expand” and “structure” them so that the powered-up words, images, and metaphors do make new our sense of things.3 As he writes in The Healing Art, this skilled labor may produce something we call a poem that “can at once make us feel sorrow and help us to understand a new concept.”4

Campo’s Poetry Received

Ricardo Ortiz devotes a chapter of his book Cultural Erotics in Cuban America to Campo’s poems, especially those that make up The Other Man Was Me (1994) and What the Body Told (1996). Here, Ortiz reads over the poems to show how they map a more complex diasporic Cuban experience and identity, or Cubanidad. While he identifies some basics such as the number of lines and lyric sensibility, Ortiz largely reads for theme to identify how poems such as “Familia” and “Songs” are expressive of a “queered practice of Cuban-diasporic reproduction.”5 In a series of analyses of the poems “Safe Sex,” “Prescription,” and “Antidote” (from What the Body Told) Ortiz makes the larger argument that the poetic forms (vaguely identified) used by Campos do not function as a “prophylactic” or “artistic guard against worldly contagion.”6 Campo’s aesthetic works as a “therapeutic instrument [and] weapon in the struggle for change.”7 The poems in the last instance become “a space and a body of erotic, aesthetic, and therapeutic contact that, in enabling this complex set of possibilities, renders each and every one of the subjects it addresses, solicits, and seduces into its readers, its lovers, and its patients.”8 For Ortiz, the poems function as an intervention into “the business as usual of the paradoxically heteropresumptive but exclusively patrimonial process of cultural reproduction in Cuban America.”9 Put simply, Ortiz focuses on content at the expense of form. And while Campo’s poetry does tell a story (some more directly than others), Ortiz’s focus only on matters of content separates content from form—deforming, if you will, the poems. Otherwise stated, Ortiz narrativizes Campo’s poetry.

This same impulse appears through and through all the other scholarship on Campo, albeit pulling on different narrative threads and thematics. S. W. Henderson, for instance, reads Campo’s medically themed poems as a how-to guide for doctors to cultivate and bring compassion to the job. The poem “The Distant Moon” at once critiques the medical profession as it is today and acts as a model for how to bring compassionate expression to the doctor-patient encounter. Henderson’s strong narrative urge leads to the identification of Campo’s poems collected in The Other Man Was Me as a “poetic Bildungsroman.”10 Other like-oriented scholars follow the medicine-themed threads to tease out various justifications for the establishing of a “medical humanities” whereby a holistic compassionate theory and practice replaces the positivist-only approach to medicine.

Yet others argue that a close reading of Campo’s poetry and expository meditative writing can expand the doctor’s imagination and lead to greater powers of observation and to new ways of diagnosing medical problems.11 Finally, some like Joanne Rendell talk about his poems as some kind of “local resistances” to “stigmatizations inherent in AIDS discourse.”12 More elaborately, Campo’s poems demonstrate, Rendell writes, how the “norms and categorizations of AIDS discourses [are] shifting, temporal, and always at risk.”13

Campo’s poems have been uniformly (with no exception) applauded—and mostly for their power to heal. Appearing in Lambda, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Literature and Medicine, the reviews focus little on the poetic and much on the stories told: being a doctor in contact with fatal diseases like cancer and AIDS, being compassionate with patients, and so forth. This like-spirited approach is also present in the encyclopedic entries on Campo such as Stacey Waite’s in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary LGBTQ Literature of the United States, 2009.

There are a few notable exceptions to the somewhat idealistic and narrative-driven approach to Campo. David Caplan’s entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography volume New Formalist Poets makes note of Campo’s seeming exclusion from the New Formalist fold as well as pays attention to his use of form. He notes that “none of the most famous New Formalists have written about his work; discussions of the movement commonly pay Campo only cursory attention, if any at all.”14 It would seem that Campo’s unorthodox use of formal constraints make his work an uneasy fit within “the broad rubric of New Formalism.”15 However, I would argue that Campo’s poems are even more consistently traditional than the New Formalist compositions by poets such as Gioia, but of course the different degrees of queer Latino (and AIDS) content of Campo’s poems push and pound at his variously architectured poetic spaces in ways that we don’t see in a poet like Gioia. (Notably, Dana Gioia recognizes Campo’s use of form even if indirectly; he does include selections of Campo’s poem “What the Body Told” under the rubric “Symbol” in his coedited volume Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing [2012]).

Thomas March (Lambda Book Report) resists totally this gravitational pull to narrativize and thematize only the poetry. He assesses the poetry as, well, poetry. March’s attentive review of matters of content and form in The Enemy (2007) allows him to identify both why many of the poems succeed as “subtle and sublime” and why others don’t succeed. He does not characterize these as failures in strictu sensu, because he recognizes that they were but “a few revisions away from being very fine poems.”16 He identifies very clearly when Campo slips into cliché, “as if temporarily holding a place for better phrases that never came—e.g., ‘eyes that penetrate’ (in ‘Ganymede to Zeus’) and an urge ‘to be swallowed forever in you’ (in ‘Catastrophic Sestina’).”17 In March’s analysis of “For Jorge after Twenty Years” he leads us to understand how the poem ends with “provocative uncertainty”18 tinged with a sense of foreboding as well as pleasure in the prospect of learning more about a person. Yet Campo’s use of a cliché—“You smiled slightly: I thought I knew why”—seemingly to conform to a rhyme scheme, leaves the poem flat and uninspired. And March asks of poems that use awkward syntax and the occasional forced rhyme if they are there to “provoke us—to encourage us to fault the rigid structures of a form for failing to support a noble intention”19 or if they result from a spatial design that forces a rhyme at the expense of the kinetic charge.

Campo’s Poetic

Drawn to the form and content of Campo’s poetry, I first published a little piece in 1997 on several of the poems in The Other Man Was Me and What the Body Told. I was struck then as I am today by how he used highly structured formal means—with an especial pull toward his choice of iambic pentameters or tetrameters and rhymed tercets or quatrains—to carry everyday phrases, actions, concerns, and preoccupations. Frankly, I liked that he didn’t do what has become commonplace in Latino letters of late and serve up more of the free-verse and prose-poem confessionals.

At this first encounter, I was intrigued by his use of the iambic pentameter when talking about two men having sex. I was compelled by how his rather heavy stories, for they are mostly all stories (some about hospital bed encounters, troubled fathers, and others about lost friends, for instance), could be told in the light hand and dancing rhythm of poetic verse.20 Topics I had become used to only finding in experimental, free-verse, or prose poetry (Juan Goytisolo and Luis Zapata come readily to mind) I found couched somehow comfortably within the formal and traditional.

As mentioned in the introduction, Latino poets have not systematically used the constraint of traditional forms in the shaping of their poetry. Yet Campo chose this path as the way to make new (to make the familiar strange) by returning to poetry’s lyric roots in meter.

A poetry restricted in its thematic scope requires especially that a whole series of formal devices be used to put subject matter at a proper distance. In his numerous poems, it is clear that thematically Campo favors domesticity. Yet—and this is not articulated as such by Campo in any of his meditations on poetry—to make domesticity new, it is not enough to introduce variations at the level of scene (two men having sex, say), vocabulary, metaphor, rhyme, or sound pattern. In this respect, it’s useful to recall Borges’s remark that in its rather long history humankind has only invented a handful of metaphors and to mention Shklovsky’s dictum that it is “not changes in imagery that constitute the essential dynamics of poetry.”21

Campo is drawn again and again to the English sonnet form (in likeness and not as orthodoxy), but in each poem and from one poem to another he does not stick to a fixed number of syllables, or even to a certain number of lines. The English sonnet form is almost always a shadow of sorts, an intimation of the classic organizing principle, and only occasionally a full-blown reality of the rhyme scheme. Sometimes he sticks to a 14-line constraint but without following the English sonnet rhyme scheme of a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g; in some instances he adheres to it, but incompletely, omitting to follow the traditional sonnet’s “g-g” rhyming couplet end. In most of his poetry he uses iambic pentameter with its short or unstressed syllable followed by the long or stressed syllable—even when writing in a rather colloquial manner. We see this in his poem “Blood,” for instance:

We waited for them at

the dime store once, where Cedric grabbed her tits

and said I’ll learn you how to love how god

intended it, you ugly fucking dyke.22

Campo’s general rule of thumb concerning meter is to not allow it to constrain his fundamental choices of words, metaphors, images, or concepts. As he asks playfully in the interview with Christopher Hennessy, in how many sonnets do you have two men having sex? For Campo, formal concerns are open choices, not absolute obligations. And the same applies to his themes, words, images, and so on.

Campo seeks to make new, to create unified compositions of form and content that will take us more deeply into the subject matter—to enstrange, as Shklovsky would say. He also seeks to create a sense of awe in our apprehension of the way he manages to pull it off. Campo has mentioned several times that his formal choices are dictated by the need to actively “locate us inside the experience of illness.”23

In David-Antoine Williams’s Defending Poetry (2010) I have found recently a wording that summarizes nicely Campo’s poetics: a self-reflexive “linguistic inventiveness within established, though ultimately violable, formal strictures.”24 I also think the concept of segmentivity useful in the characterization of poetry. To remind us here, segmentivity is the selection and arrangement of words and the imposing of breaks (line and stanza) that can potentially intensify our meaning-making processes as well as give the poem its energy as we move from line to line and stanza to stanza, for instance.

Before I discuss and analyze specific poems, I offer several general observations:

First, Campo’s poetry is about anything and everything: mothers, daughters, fathers, hospital patients, inquisitions, conquests, skies, AIDS victims in Africa, bile, drag contests in Key West, you name it. Just as a wheelbarrow (William Carlos Williams) or a telegraph pole (Whitman) can be the subject of a poem, so too can all the above, and much more. When the sky is the limit, it is good to remind ourselves that it is not in the theme that we find the defining feature of poetry.

Second, Campo leans heavily on the use of metaphor—on his specific, individual use of metaphor. However, here I don’t mean metaphor in the cognitive linguistic (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) sense. Rather, Campo’s use of metaphor is characterized by his bringing of more or less distant concepts or thoughts or images, emotions or affects, into one unit—a unit that could be a word but could also be a turn of phrase—in a more or less new or original way.

We often see in the poems Campo’s willful use of language, structure, and device to bring together feelings, emotions, affects, and concepts from medicine—more generally, states of health and disease or illness—together with everyday emotions of grief and so on plus a whole series of scientific or scientific-like origin concepts. And we feel and sense this unification of the distantly related as having an overtly aesthetic purpos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Coda
• Interviews
• Notes
• Bibliography