628 The American Century: Literature since 1945much of a hybrid as its author evidently feels himself to be. Campo similarly sees
himself as occupying a liminal space, in his case because of his mixed identity as a
medical doctor, an HIV-negative gay man, and a latino. Much of his work is
concerned with his medical practice, his patients, and his feeling of being torn
between poetry and medicine. Another poet-physician, William Carlos Williams,
suggested that the poet works on his subject and his poem as a physician works on
the body of the patient, with scrupulous, undivided attention. And Campo
demonstrates a similar attentiveness, using form to try to make sense of the body,
its functions and its problems, in poems brought together in such collections as
The Other Man Was Me: A Voyage to the New World (1993) and What the Body Told
(1996). In “Night Inexpressible” the strictly constructed tercets form a structure
that enables the poet to express and begin to understand his relationship with a
particular patient. And elsewhere he performs a delicate balancing act, sympathizing
with his subjects, recognizing his connections with such marginalized groups as
gays and latinos, but acknowledging the necessity of distance. Both as a doctor and
a poet, Campo recognizes he must negotiate a route between convergence and
separation, engagement and critical removal if he is to do full justice to the people
and bodies to which he attends. It is form that is the enabler here, Campo clearly
feels; the structures he deploys, the poetic disciplines he embraces, provide just
such a route, permit him both intimacy and distance.
Undoubtedly, the two New Formalist poets who have received most attention are
two of those most concerned with promoting the New Formalist cause, Brad
Leithauser and Dana Gioia. They are also among the most accomplished of this
loosely affiliated group. Leithauser, whose collections of poetry include Hundreds of
Fireflies (1982), The Mail from Anywhere (1990), and Curves and Angels (2006),
draws on a variety of influences in his richly allusive work, among them Robert
Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and A. E. Housman. He is equally various and adventurous
in his choice of forms, and especially interested in how the formal properties of a
poem can measure its subject and register its meaning. So his poem “Rabbits:
A Valentine” celebrates the fabled casual sexuality of that creature in lines that cap-
ture the hip-hop rhythms of the rabbit’s characteristic movement. “Deliberate / on
the rabbit,” the poet advises, “who if what you / hear is half true / has found the way /
to inhabit / a world without / elaborate / courtship.” Cheeky rhymes (“for / whom
even sex / is not complex”), jaunty word-play (“who’s sharp on fun- / damentals”)
and verbal acrobatics (“meets and mates,” “diversify and multiply”): all are deployed
to celebrate the casual concupiscence of a creature who, the poem concludes, is
“innocent and / intelligent.” A similar mix of apparent innocence and beguiling
intelligence is at work in the poem itself. This is a valentine that manages to be both
jokey and serious, droll and deeply felt: a love letter, written to a creature that the
poet, and consequently the reader, end up not sure whether they do or do not know.
The rabbit in this poem hovers on the boundary between the familiar and the mys-
terious: part of a natural world that is a mirror to our own yet different, resolutely
other – a border territory, hovering between what we humans can imagine and what
perhaps lies beyond our imaginative compass.GGray_c05.indd 628ray_c 05 .indd 628 8 8/1/2011 7:31:35 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 35 PM