Rafael Campo: After great pain, a formal feeling comes – The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’ And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?   The Feet, mechanical, go round – A Wooden way Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone –   This is the Hour of Lead – Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow – First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –   Adam Kampe: That’s Dr. Rafael Campo reading one of his go-to Emily Dickinson poems, #372---“After great pain, a formal feeling comes.”   Campo: I find Dickinson’s poems in particular really lend themselves to a conversation about how we live with illness that’s extremely useful for many of my patients and actually for me too in trying to care for them so yeah, I do share her poems often with patients.   Adam Kampe: You heard that right. Campo is not only a poet nor is he only a doctor, he’s a doctor who uses poetry in his medical practice. Campo teaches at Harvard Medical School and works at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center where he was when we spoke about poetry, art and health, and how all three intersect with his poetry idols, Emily Dickinson.   AK: A physician and a poet?  Rafael Campo:  Yes, believe it or not.   AK: Are you trying to make the rest of us look bad? Rafael Campo:  I promise that’s not the case. I’m not trying to make others look bad. I’m just very proud of my dual life and want to do in any way that I can kind of service to poetry and to literature especially in the world of doctors where we don’t have enough I think presence of the arts and the humanities in a broad sense in the work that we do. AK: I CERTAINLY HOPE OTHER DOCTORS TAKE YOUR LEAD. WOW. SO  WE’RE IN PART GONNA BE TALKING ABOUT YOU AND YOU CAREER AND ALSO AS WE MENTIONED EMILY DICKINSON. AND ON THAT NOTE I JUST WANTED TO SAY CONGRATULATIONS FOR BEING SELECTED AS THE TRIBUTE READER AT THE FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY FOR THE CELEBRATION OF EMILY’S BIRTH COMING UP THIS DECEMBER 10^TH. Rafael Campo:  Oh, what a wonderful honor for me and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to share my thoughts about her work particularly in relation to science and healing. I think she is an extraordinary poet for so many reasons but I think probably not appreciated as much as she should be for the ways in which she interrogates the natural world and certainly really I think reflects on science as a way of understanding and knowing the world. AK: FOR THOSE WHO DON’T KNOW, WHO IS EMILY DICKINSON? Rafael Campo: Emily Dickinson in my view is probably the most if not one of the most important American poets. She was born in the early 1800s and died unfortunately at a relatively young age in her early fifties. She was I think fascinated by the natural world and by science. And in fact she lived at a time when there were tremendous advances being made in the realm of the sciences. The locomotive was invented, surgery was first performed with ether during her lifetime. AK: Do you recall the first time you read a poem by Emily Dickinson? Rafael Campo:  I certainly do. I actually, well, the very first time I read her poems was when I was a student in high school but I became I think much more deeply acquainted with her work when I was a student at Amherst College, and I remember spending many afternoons in her garden actually at Amherst which was the Dickinson homestead. It’s really just across the street from the Amherst College campus so I would spend many afternoons there reading her poems and flitting around in that garden like one of the birds or one of the butterflies that appear so frequently in her work. And that’s when I really I think became truly enamored of her writing and   poetry. There’s this one that I just absolutely always come to as a scientist that really I always find just incredibly shocking but also again beautiful and transcendent in some sense. It’s number 861 in the Johnson edition, “Split the Lark.” Rafael Campo:  So okay, here goes. Split the Lark—and you'll find the Music— Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled— Scantilly dealt to the Summer Morning Saved for your Ear when Lutes be old. Loose the Flood—you shall find it patent— Gush after Gush, reserved for you— Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas! Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true? Rafael Campo:  Oh, that’s just, that’s incredible….that-- I can’t believe she wrote that. It’s just, like, oh, my God. Amazing. It truly is a singular experience. It’s at once I think a kind of physical experience where one feels in a way possessed by this extraordinarily unique voice and then at the same time this engagement with just a formidable and very powerful intellect. And so it’s at once a kind of visceral and cognitive experience, which gets to I think this connection between healing and poetry in her work, or perhaps this sort of scientific world view, this very, very fierce way of interrogating the world and then also knowing it experientially through one’s soul, through one’s heart. Music bridge AK: I have a few ideas of poems from Alternative Medicine that I’d like you to read, but I was curious if in the thread of what you were just talking about is there anything you would like to read? Rafael Campo: I was thinking one poem in particular because I wrote it actually thinking about Emily Dickinson and her work. It’s called “Iatrogenic,” which is sort of a funny title…Ok here we go.       “Iatrogenic” You say, “I do this to myself.” Outside, my other patients wait. Maybe snow falls; we’re all just waiting for our deaths to come, we’re all just hoping it won’t hurt too much. You say, “It makes it seem less lonely here.” I study them, as if the deep red cuts were only wounds, as if they didn’t hurt so much. The way you hold your upturned arms, the cuts seem aimed at your unshaven face. Outside, my other patients wait their turns. I run gloved fingertips along their course, as if I could touch pain itself, as if by touching pain I might alleviate my own despair. You say, “It’s snowing, Doc.” The snow, instead of howling, soundlessly comes down. I think you think it’s beautiful; I say, “This isn’t all about the snow, is it?” The way you hold your upturned arms, I think about embracing you, but don’t. I think, “We do this to ourselves.” I think the falling snow explains itself to us, blinding, faceless, and so deeply wounding. Jeffrey Rosen - Music bridge. AK: Thank you for reading that. Rafael Campo:  Thanks for the opportunity. AK: I know this is your latest collection. When did you write that? Rafael Campo: Probably five, six years ago. I remember actually it was a really-- there was a really big snowstorm here in Boston. I was in my clinic seeing patients and thinking of Dickinson’s work, and in my experience of sharing it with the others and certainly every time I encounter it I think of her and I think of that give and take and a sense of empathy that is so hard for us I think in some ways to define. My colleagues in medicine tease me a lot about this and say, “Oh, you can’t define empathy and if you can’t define it how are you going to teach it to medical students?” And that’s another big part of my work here is trying to use the humanities, implement the humanities in medical education settings in the curriculum at the medical school here at Harvard and colleagues are skeptical. They say, “The students have so much to learn and now you want to teach them poetry and you can’t even define empathy so how are you going to teach it to them?” But I do think poems can help us to model empathy much more effectively than we do so… I do find that…. I said a little bit before that every interaction with a patient is in some sense a form of poetry, and so I find myself just totally immersed in storytelling in the voice of other people and that process in a sense is always shaping language in my own head. And when I do have a moment to sit down when a piece of paper in front of me or my journal often what comes out is a poem that has in some sense been polished by this constant flow of language through my head and to some extent the sounds of the body that I hear through my stethoscope as well. I’m very attracted to so-called formal poetry or metrical forms because I think of that-- those physical rhythms that I’m hearing all the time through my stethoscope and through-- even in conversation with patients; it’s amazing how much of our spontaneous speech is iambic. Clears throat. So okay, here it is. “Hospital Song” Someone is dying alone in the night. The hospital hums like a consciousness. I see their faces where others see blight.   The doctors make their rounds like satellites, impossible to fathom distances.  Someone is dying alone under lights,   deficient in some electrolyte. A mother gives birth: life replenishes. I see pain in her face where others see fright.   A woman with breast cancer seems to be right when she refuses our assurances that we won’t let her die alone tonight;   I see her face when I imagine flight, when I dream of respite. Life punishes us, faces searching ours for that lost light   which we cannot restore. try as we might. The nurses’ white sneakers say penances, contrite as someone dying in the night.   As quiet as mercy, the morning’s rites begin. Over an old man’s grievances, his face contorted in the early light,     an aide serenely tends to him, her slight black figure fleeting yet all hopefulness – her face the face of others who see light, like someone dying at peace in the night. Music stays under, soft. AK: That was POET AND Dr. Rafael Campo discussing the power of poetry to HEAL people,  SPECIFICALLY HIS PATIENTS.    CREDITS: Poems by Rafael Campo from his collection, Alternative Medicine, used by permission of the author and Duke University Press. Poems by Emily Dickinson reprinted electronically by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983, 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. MUSIC: