California

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares Rafael Campo's poem, "California." Campo is a poet and essayist, has Cuban and Italian roots, and serves as the Director of Literature and Writing Programs at Harvard Medical School. He practices internal medicine at both Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Additionally, he is the poetry editor of JAMA.

Campo started practicing internal medicine in the early 1990s, at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the US. And poems about that experience are prominent in his work. He is the author of numerous prize winning poetry collections, including What the Body Told (1996), and he was the winner of a Lambda Literary Award from The Lambda Literary Foundation, an American LGBTQ literary organization whose mission is to nurture and advocate for LGBTQ writers, and affirm the value of LGBTQ stories and lives.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 26 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.