Iowa Journal of Literary Studies

Hill, Rick

CONVERSATION WITH A PRO
Rick Hill
So you dug my little thing on Apartheid 
and now you wanna know what makes poems 
matter.
Nice gig, poetry.
No big bucks,
but grants and fellowships bring in the groceries, 
and outguessing the weenies 
who edit those piss-ant quarterlies 
pulls down some pocket change.
Hey, I got it wired:
this season Revolution’s back, also naughty science.
Odes to your cock are out,
but paens to pussies that taste like citrus
still go if you use a fake name, like Falana, say,
and send em to those flaky fem rags.
If that don’t fetch em,
surreal puttin-it-in-there with black chick/dude 
ditties,
or my-brother-the-tree yawners will.
Suicide and Depression? Bread and butter.
Funny though,
old homeboy of mine pulled the ripcord last month; 
sliced his wrists and strung himself from the ceiling, 
but I still haven’t covered it.
Didn’t even read my latest at his sendoff.
He was a poet too— 
or thought he was.
I knew his stuff stank, but 
I told him, “What the fuck, Ace, mail it off, 
the weenies might bite.
137
If you don’t sell yourself, 
you’re just jackin off.
But first cut the shit out of it;
it reads like the fuckin Encyclopedia Brittanica
now!”
But fools keep foolin: 
he kept bleedin out nothin but 
five-page double-column love-rapture 
celebration-of-nature crap that woulda 
gave Walt Whitman a hard-on plus, 
when he knew well as me that nobody 
from bigshit conference guru 
to jerkwater college pulp dink 
wants to look at more than sixty-five lines.
The chump even used rhymes sometimes! 
Lame, lame, really LAME.
No gumption to ode up a grant, 
poeticize a food stamp app, 
or butt-kiss unemployment clerks— 
a little too poetic to live, yep, 
another dead fuckin 
loser.
But hey, you’re buyin, 
don’t wanna bum you out!
Check my new Nicaragua haiku, here.
Still gotta slick it up some . . . 
maybe a Spanish title.
Got the hook when Viet-Nam was happening,
but who gives a shit about ‘Nam now,
cept maybe some boo-hoo veteran rags,
but they don’t pay nothin—
gotta split? Aw, only takes a couple—
ok, ok. Catch you later.
Thanks for the vino,
Asshole.
138


English

Conversation with a Pro

Carlson, Victoria

BOOK REVIEW
Victoria Carlson
Times of Surrender, Selected Essays by Robert Coles. University of Iowa 
Press, 1988.
If  SURRENDER M e a n t  nothing more than resignation and defeat, 
then the title of this recent collection of essays by Dr. Robert Coles 
would seem very bleak indeed. And bleakness might well be an 
appropriate response to these times, particularly coming from this 
Harvard professor of psychiatry and medical humanities who won the 
Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for his nonfiction series Children of Crisis. Yet in 
documenting the struggles of children growing up in poverty, racial 
strife, and conditions which painfully reflect larger political and social 
turmoil, Coles has often revealed the amazing (to us adults, at least) 
inner resilience and wisdom such children can show in the face of 
extreme adversity.
Robert Coles has obviously learned to listen for more than symp­
toms of psychiatric maladies. As a result, he has heard small voices 
speak more eloquently than those who use far bigger words. As one 
whose work goes beyond the often theory-bound conventions of his 
discipline, Coles recognizes the authority of the personal, and in turn 
the need to reflect as well as to analyze. In much of this reflection 
Coles draws on his extensive and informed interests in literature, 
religion, and politics. (He has previously written about the lives and 
works of Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Simone 
Weil, and William Carlos Williams.)
The range of topics Coles pursues in Times of Surrender is evident in 
such titles as “Why Novels and Poems in Our Medical Schools?,” “The 
Holocaust and Today’s Kids,” and “Character and Intellect.” The 
subject at the heart of this collection, though, is the limits of 
“expertise” and the need to surrender some of our untested devotion 
to its theories, jargon, and cultural prestige. This surrender becomes
149
a way of pursuing more personal ways of discerning truth and living 
with it, ways that transcend the blind trust of professional authority. 
To do this Coles often looks to literature.
In the book’s introduction, Coles explains this idea of surrender in 
an anecdote from his residency in child psychiatry: as he struggles to 
begin the therapy of a deeply troubled young boy, he listens to his 
supervisor advise him not to push the process towards a quick, clinical 
judgement, but instead to remain open to the boy’s revelation of his 
own story in his own time. Coles and his young patient play checkers 
in these early, awkward stages of therapy. As the boy prepares to beat 
his doctor at the game (and, the apprehensive young doctor fears, 
beat him at the therapy game as well), the boy offers Coles some 
advice: “Sometimes if you surrender you’re winning, because you’re 
free of worrying about losing and you find a better game for yourself.” 
At that point, the game of checkers is over, but therapy begins for the 
patient. Moreover, a different sense of professionalism develops in the 
struggling, analytically inclined young doctor. “This bright, sensitive, 
introspective boy,” writes Coles, years later, “helped me figure out not 
only some of his problems but some of mine, too—a lack of respect, at 
times, for the distinctions between the intellect’s realm, and yes, that 
of the spirit, too, as against the domain so often affected by our 
psychological burdens, if not demons.”
Thus the psychiatrist who learns to listen for someone’s story (or 
who considers the human problems revealed in a novel) surrenders 
the power of claiming to understand the mind, and takes up the 
mystery of sensing the spirit. Ultimately, this kind of surrender—this 
pursuit of a better game—is not so much a giving up, or a giving in, 
as it is the surrender of absolute intellectual authority that gives way to 
a deeper, more revealing and personal means of inquiry.
The forty-one selections brought together in this collection ap­
peared originally in a variety of publications during the seventies and 
eighties, including the New Yorker, the Journal of the American Medical 
Association, and the American Poetry Review. The pieces fall under 
categories which connect literature to the professions of psychiatry, 
psychology, and medicine, and to the experience of religion and 
politics, and to the lives of children and minority peoples. Not all of 
these selections are essays; also included is an interview in which Coles 
discusses his being drawn to medicine, his friendship with William 
Carlos Williams, his teaching, and his approach to writing. Other 
pieces are book reviews of such works as Robert Jay Lifton’s Death in 
Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcis­
150
sism, Lillian Heilman’s Scoundrel Time, and John Kennedy Toole’s A 
Confederacy of Dunces. Yet his reviews are essayistic, often engaging and 
testing larger ideas as he vigorously examines the subjects and issues 
he reads about so astutely.
Most of these pieces, however, are essays of the most genuine and 
compelling sort; they show not only the mind of the essayist at work 
but they reveal the passion that comes with what Virginia Woolf 
described as a “fierce attachment to an idea.” In these essays, Coles 
offers a frankness of voice that is powerfully intimate and searching.
Some particular essays stand out in my mind as I reflect on the 
tremendous range and richness of this collection: “The Wry Dr. 
Chekhov,” in which Coles reflects on his medical school experience of 
listening to a dying young woman confront the end of her life through 
references to Chekhov; and “Through Conrad’s Eyes,” an account of 
Coles’ meeting Robert Kennedy while Coles was testifying before 
congressional committees on poverty, and their subsequent conversa­
tions about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and the novels of Joseph 
Conrad.
These and other essays in Times of Surrender may well draw many 
readers back to the bookshelf for another, fuller look at Chekhov, 
Conrad, and George Eliot (among others)— and quite likely, for more 
of Robert Coles. This collection offers the increasingly rare opportu­
nity to come away from reading about literature with a renewed 
enthusiasm for actually reading works of literature.
Although this book will speak to a wide audience, Times of Surrender 
particularly ought to be a graduation gift for anyone intent on 
pursuing the profession of higher education. Such statements as “it 
would be a big boost for many of us if . . . America’s late-twentieth- 
century were . . . less enamored of the conceits of theory” will no 
doubt challenge us, perhaps disturb or humble some of us, but 
ultimately remind us that the knowledge we strive so hard to attain 
and demonstrate can serve a higher purpose than establishing our 
own expertise.
We need such a message, I think as I reflect on life in the research 
university where I study and teach (and where I hear so much 
self-assured theoretical talk). And as I ponder how I’ll convince my 
students next week of the value of reading Flannery O’Connor, I turn 
to these thoughtful lines from this wise and compelling book by 
Robert Coles:
This life is full of questions . . . the humanities are meant to help us try . . . to find 
useful, decent, appropriate, sensible answers. Not that there ever will be complete, 
definite, thoroughly clear answers. The humanities are not, at heart, preoccupied 
with factuality. . . . “The task of the novelist,” said Flannery O’Connor, “is to 
deepen mystery”; and if ever there was both an implied definition of what the
151
humities are about and a rebuke to a predominant contemporary sensibility it is 
contained in that critical observation—one of the many shrewd, pointed, often 
caustic comments that marvelous and all too short-lived, twentieth-century story­
teller from Milledgeville, Georgia, gave to the rest of us who continue to make our 
way toward the year 2000.
152


Times of Surrender, Selected Essays by Robert Coles

Rooks, Noliwe

Writing Themselves into Existence: The Intersection of History and Literature in Writings on Black Women

Schwartzman, Roy

PENDULUMS
Roy Schwartzman
Another gnat-clouded Georgia afternoon 
clings like a wet blanket to sweaty skin.
Silent porch-sitters, their brown tongues busy
sculpting Skoal into leafy bullets
to nestle beside jaundice-yellow teeth,
gouge rockers deeper
into warped two-by-fours,
watch flakes of sun-baked paint
scuttle across the banisters
and dive onto parched red clay.
Hours underneath tin awnings 
unravel like the wicker 
imprinting tautness 
on unsuspecting backs and thighs. 
Floorboards creak on weathered foundations, 
rhythmic groans lull into contentment. 
Pendulums sway on withered cinderblocks 
crafted by palsied hands.
Wicker burrows into brittle bone.
Entwined from splinter-scarred toes
to Nehi-dried lips
in wicker wishes,
rockers lean without direction,
imprisoned in
betweenness.
140


Pendulums

Slatton, Ralph

Refuge

Moore, Benjamin

"The Nun's Priest's Tale" As An Interrogative Text: Chaucer's Invitation to Examine Patriarchal Christianity

Smith, Ken

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 10.1

Graves, Harold

Hill, Ingrid

We Go to Xochimilco

Connor, James A.

ALWAYS A NEW WORLD
James A. Connor
T h e  O l d  FOLKS home was a place where people evaporated in mind 
and body. I went there twice a month, partly to boil away guilt and 
partly to face mortality head on. There was a fellow there who 
sometimes caused me pain—Billy Seymour, a Shuswap Indian from 
Dead Man’s Creek, pronounced by the locals “Debman’s Creek.” Billy 
was ninety-six, deaf, toothless, and loud, and the pain I often felt in his 
presence, a baffled, diffuse misery in my intestines, came not so much 
from what he said or did, but from what he had become.
Billy lived in a single room with his wife, Mary, who warned me not 
to believe a word he said because he was senile and couldn’t be trusted 
to get things right. All the while she talked, Billy grinned lustfully at 
her from his wheelchair. The two of them had grown up together in 
the backwoods of British Columbia, and had known each other all 
their lives. Mary had borne and buried three of his children, and 
according to Billy, had never given him a day’s rest. As he told me this, 
Mary looked up from her knitting, made a squawking duck with her 
fingers and thumb. “Talk, talk, talk,” she said.
Personally, I enjoyed the litter of Billy’s talk—the steelhead that got 
away, the women who didn’t, the eagle he saw on the mountain, the 
gold nugget he found in a stream. Everything in his life was boldly 
colored, and if he lied more times than not, it didn’t seem to matter. 
Lying for him was just another way to tell the truth.
7*sus, Billy,” I said to him on one of his more lucid days. “You can 
pull on a thing, and pull on a thing, and pull on a thing, until it’s 
something else entirely.”
“Ohhh, you know, Fadr?” Billy said, grinning so I knew it was a lie. 
“That’s someting the white man taught us how to do.”
Most of the time, Billy meandered into old hunting tales, always 
climbing to the brink of some disaster. If it wasn’t a bear, it was a wolf. 
And even though his memory had grayed sometime after 1935, the
75
stories he had told over and over since the first days of the twentieth 
Century were as bright as color television.
When Billy told a story, he was a high wire walker, a human fly, 
balancing between perfect recall and amnesia. Sometimes, he’d lose 
the thread of his tale, lose it utterly, forget where he was and who he 
was talking to, stop, squint at the world as if everything he saw around 
him was suddenly new, then start again. He generally found his way 
back, though, in spite of his deafness and his confusion. He must have 
been so used to his own lies that he didn’t need to hear himself speak 
any more than a mule needed directions to tread a circle.
When I first met Billy, I was in the collar, looking like a priest, which 
is hard for me because I don’t often feel that way. I feel like myself and 
am startled when someone who doesn’t know my name calls me 
“Father” and wants to buy me lunch. But somehow as I sat with Billy 
in his room, with the dusty tv in the corner near the washbasin, the 
glass rosary pinned to the wall above, the fiery painting of the Sacred 
Heart over the bed near the window, the yellow sun pooling on the 
sheets, and the smell of alcohol and old age, I felt a great calm settle 
on me, a sense of homeliness and peace. At ninety-six, I suppose, Billy 
had earned the right to instant friendship.
On one visit, I leaned over him as he sat in his wheelchair beside the 
washbasin, his breath the odor of wet shit, his face caught in the 
sunlight, the skin delicate, corrugated and broken, pocked in places 
where the brittle surface had torn open into rankling sores. It seemed 
that he had three times more skin than was needed to cover his body. 
The unused portion hung off him in pleats, from great wide folds 
under his eyes and jowls to dainty penknife strokes crosshatched into 
his cheeks. His head drooped near his chest, and I watched silently as 
his right ear, soft with age, the lobe hanging down to his neck, rose 
and fell with his breathing. I prodded him, called his name until he 
stirred, squinted into my face, alarmed. Then he noticed the collar 
and relaxed.
“Ohhh, Fadr,” he said, shaking his head. I turned a chair backwards 
and sat beside him, in the middle of the room between him and his 
wife so that I could see them both. Billy was wedged into his 
wheelchair with pillows, his translucent arms showing red and blue 
veins, with round dark spots like cancers on his hands. “I was a bad 
man, Fadr. A real bad man. I was drinkin’ and I was doin’ real bad 
tings. Sometimes I was even sleepin’ with the real bad women and 
everyting.”
Billy’s wife Mary laughed. She tsked him. “Don’t you believe it, 
Fadr. He’s a big fibber.”
76
Billy grinned as if he had heard what she said. He grinned, proud 
of himself.
“I used to be gamblin’ and drinkin’ most ever night, you know.” 
“A fibber.”
“Did I tell you bout the bear I got me a few years back?”
Mary reached over from her chair by the window and touched my 
arm. “Fadr, don’t let him tell you about the bear. He’ll go on and on.” 
“Well, that bear, he was maybe eighteen hand at the shoulder. Big 
as a horse, Fadr. Biggest grizzly I ever seen. I tracked him, maybe 
three, maybe four days, eh? In the snow, Fadr. He was smart—circled 
round, nearly got me, too, but I kept on him. Yes sir, Fadr. I did. It 
was almost winter and he was lookin’ for a place to bed down, eh? Oh, 
it was a bad winter. A real bad one. We had snow up over the windows. 
Well, I knew with winter cornin’, that bear, he was lookin’ for a place, 
eh? and I knew he’d found one cause I seen his tracks. He’d been 
sniffin’ round a old log with the roots of a tree hangin’ over. He’d been 
cozy in there so I knew he’d be back. That’s right, Fadr. He’d be real 
cozy in the winter, so I waited for him over to one side, down the hill 
in the bush, and I brought me some rye whiskey to keep warm. So I 
sat in the bush, maybe two days, maybe three, and drank that rye 
whiskey and said my rosry, Fadr. I prayed to Jesus and Mary to send 
that there bear along, eh?, so I could shoot him, feed my family, eh? 
Just like Fadr Le Jeune told me, eh . . .?”
At that, Billy reached his hand out and pointed at something in the 
forest around him. The bed where the old log lay covered with snow 
was just under the point where the Sacred Heart picture was nailed to 
the wall. The snow, still falling, filled the room, covered the bed and 
the floor where the sun had shifted to the wood parquet. I felt the 
snow and the cold clear through my light clerical shirt.
“That’s when I seen him,” Billy said. “A shadow in the trees. Real 
quiet. He was sniffin’ round that old log, picked up my scent even 
after maybe two, maybe three days. Then he was movin’ round, 
sniffin’ first up by the poplar near the top of the hill, then back down 
the trail. He knew I was there somewhere about. He was a big one, 
Fadr. And smart, too. He raised up on his hind legs, sniffin’, his nose 
stuck in the air. He raised up, got wind of me, and started toward the 
bushes where I was hidin’, eh? I aimed my rifle and I pulled the 
trigger . . .”
At that moment, the nurse came in, a young woman, crisp, 
brunette, with precise fingers, very Canadian, and with that hint of a 
Scottish brogue that only an American like myself could detect. She 
took Billy’s pulse. Grinning, he reached around to try to pat her 
behind, and she deftly slipped aside, out of reach.
77
“Now, Billy. Don’t be naughty,” she said.
Billy grinned up at her, and then his eyes fogged over. By the time 
the nurse had left, they cleared, shiny and alert again, and he glanced 
around the room, afraid, as if he had never seen the place before. 
Everything was new to him, unfamiliar, the walls, the rosary, the 
Sacred Heart, the smell of alcohol and old age. The world was full of 
strangers. He stared at me, blinked twice in desperation.
“Who the hell are you?” he said, looking straight at me.
That moment hung empty between us. Mary rocked her chair in the 
corner of the room; her feet tapped the floor. Yellow sunlight bathed 
Billy’s face. His red and blue hand paused, fastened in the air. 
Outside, rainbird sprinklers, awakened, swept water across the lawn. 
A hummingbird flew up the window, hovered. The universe was held 
in suspense while Billy blinked himself back into the dream, the 
dream that comes with memory and the belief that the world as we 
know it is real. The universe tilted, while Billy and I waited in 
suspense and wondered which way it would fall. It was as if all the 
colors changed places, all the shapes dissolved and reformed, all the 
electrons spun at ninety degrees. I didn’t want to move for fear I 
might disturb the change, interrupt the flow so the galaxies would 
never slip back into shape.
Mary’s breathing whistled through her nose. The hummingbird 
buzzed against the window. It seemed impossible to me that the earth 
could be called into question so completely. Waves of strangeness 
poured out of Billy, boiled across the room, until the white walls and 
the sunlight and the rosary and Billy and Mary and the mountains and 
all the stars in heaven had become infinitely new and fearful. I hadn’t 
forgotten as had Billy, but only remembered something I had long 
tried to forget. Nothing has to be the way it is. The universe twists, 
spins, runs on, a holy fire. God speaks to Moses, to Billy, and to Mary 
Seymour from the center of the flames. Taking courage, I leaned 
forward and whispered.
“I’m Father, Billy,” I said. “Father.” Billy blinked again.
“Ohhh, Yaa&r. It’s good to see you, Fadr. You know, I been a bad 
man, Fadr. A real bad man. I been drinkin’ and gamblin’ and sleepin’ 
with the real bad women, Fadr.”
“I know, Billy. What about the bear?”
“You know, Fadr, I once got me this big bear.”
Senility puzzles me. Like most people, I’m a closet dualist. I like to 
think of myself as an eternal spirit who has an accidental association 
with matter. The body can fall to rack and ruin, but the flame of the
78
soul burns on. Yet in the face of senility, all my cozy warm ideas are 
questioned. Where do memories go? Is there hope of their return? So 
much of what I call myself is wrapped in my own peculiar memories. 
The thought of senility is frightening, not because it’s an unhappy 
state—Billy was happy—or because it is a precursor of death. You 
don’t need to be senile to die. Senility seems to kill the memories 
which glue a life together, so the real world becomes indistinguishable 
from the dream.
At times, I have thought that the loss of memory would be like 
Sheol—an empty blank nonexistence. How can I know who I am, or 
where I am, how can I live a life without all the thousand stories that 
help me make sense of this world? Without memories, I have no home 
in a world that shifts, changes, flashes like sparkles on a lake.
In my work, I have known many people like Billy. There is a 
mystery in them all. I have seen sudden reversals of personality, as if 
old skin were peeling off to reveal a new face. This can be a terrible 
thing to see.
I knew a man, a bishop, who was a saint, once. Everyone said so. He 
lived poor, gave away most everything he had, bought his shoes at St. 
Vincent de Paul’s, and drove a rust-infested old Chevrolet to work, 
even though he made good money. At seventy, he was stricken with 
Alzheimer’s Disease, and took up cursing. Within two years, he had 
become violent and had to be put away.
I knew another man, a priest, who had the reputation of being one 
of the toughest pastors in the diocese. In his time, he grew old and 
slipped into a frothy dream. Sometimes he thinks the people on tv are 
real. Other times, he swears Mt. St. Helens is exploding right outside 
his window. But he’s not afraid. He laughs, tells people all about it.
“Just go outside and look for yourself,” he says. “It’s on fire.”
If told no, Frank, that was a long time ago, in another part of the 
state, he insists, shakes his head, tightens his lips. He cannot be 
dissuaded.
“No, no,” he says. “Just go outside and look.” Then he laughs.
Nothing that is hidden will remain hidden. All will come to light. 
The glue that holds the world together slowly melts.
What happens when the memories are gone? In Billy’s mind, did 
the universe quit being and then start up again, all within the time it 
took for a nurse to feel his pulse? Each new universe seemed so utterly 
new to him.
There is a point of saturation, where newness is more terrifying 
than death.
79
When Billy Seymour died, I was there. I presided at the funeral 
three days later. It took place out at Dead Man’s Creek, on the 
Reservation. All of us—Mary Seymour, old old Aunt Annie in her red 
kerchief, the Peters’ boys, Ed and J.T., who leaned on their shovels 
and looked glum, the little Seymour girl, black haired and pretty, with 
two kids of her own hanging on, and Vincent the bellringer, who 
wasn’t family but who had become an institution on the Reservation 
by ringing the church bell at every funeral for the last forty-five years. 
All of us, and a few dozen others gathered around the hole in the 
ground and stared at the coffin. No one wanted to start, not even me, 
one of the only two all-fired-up-in-a-hurry white men in the bunch.
On the Reservation, they bury the body themselves. They dig the 
hole, lower the coffin inside, and fill in the dirt. Everybody turns out. 
Most of them don’t go to church. A few don’t like missionaries. Quite 
a few don’t like white people out of general principles. But they all 
show up for funerals. In the church, they line up to say goodbye— 
they hug the body, sometimes even kiss it on the mouth, which drives 
the funeral director insane. I approve of that. I feel sorry for funeral 
directors; it’s not an easy job, but anything which will drive one insane 
I approve of. I see it as a revolutionary act, a clenched fist raised at 
death, like firing a twenty-one gun salute or rattling a fetish bag at the 
demons to scare them away. I think people should rebel, especially at 
things they can do nothing about. They did that at Dead Man’s Creek, 
and I nodded at them while the funeral director, another white man 
with a digital watch, fretted.
Ed and J.T. and a few other men filled in the hole over Billy. Two 
women started the rosary. When we were done, a few others sang a 
hymn, an old one from the St. Basil’s hymn book. I never heard it 
before; it sounded antique. There are pockets in the world where 
people remember everything.
When the grave was filled, we waited around for someone to say a 
few words. My part was finished; I had said the prayers, given my 
sermon about the love of God and the Angels, all of which I believed 
in more fiercely then than ever before. At this point, the words would 
have to rise up from them, to put the cap on the day, to let Billy go. 
Even as their priest, I could be there for years and still, at times, be a 
stranger. Vincent was often the one who said the words. He was the 
bell ringer after all.
“The world is goin’ crazy,” he said. “Everbody’s crazy.”
No one moved. They never looked him in the eye when he spoke, 
but they listened. You felt the change, a shift in attention, a sudden 
indrawing of breath. They stared at the dirt, at their feet, at the plastic 
flowers which never die. They heard.
“No one listens to the old people anymore.”
80


Always a New World

Not a member yet

Conversation with a Pro

Times of Surrender, Selected Essays by Robert Coles

Writing Themselves into Existence: The Intersection of History and Literature in Writings on Black Women

Pendulums

Refuge

"The Nun's Priest's Tale" As An Interrogative Text: Chaucer's Invitation to Examine Patriarchal Christianity

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 10.1

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 10.1

We Go to Xochimilco

Always a New World

241

376