Tribute to Mental Health Workers

Conversations with
Ted Kooser & William O’Daly

 

Releasing in December, 2010, Rattle #34 turns its attention to another intimate vocation, spotlighting the poetry of 26 mental health professionals. These psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, counselors, and case-workers dive inside the mind daily and come home soggy with the muck of dreams. Many of them write about their careers, but the scope is broad, and all of their poems are informed by years of training and unique insights on the human soul. The section is highlighted throughout by the stunning abstract portraiture of art therapist Mia Barkan Clarke. As psychoanalyst Forrest Hamer writes, “so much depends on what’s under.”

Yet the Tribute is only part of the issue. Rattle #34’s open section features the work of 50 poets, plus the 11 winners of the 2010 Rattle Poetry Prize. Also, Alan Fox interviews former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser and Pablo Neruda translator William O’Daly.

 

	Mental Health Workers
	Richard Brostoff	Some Thoughts on the Relationship…
	Michelle Amerson	Delusions
	Myra Binns Bridgforth	3 p.m. Clients Must Not Be Boring
	Elizabeth Burk	Living Alone
	Elizabeth Chapman	Stella
	Sharon L. Charde	Love’s Executioner
	Nina Corwin	Speaking of Tongues
	Ray Emanuel	4% of Everything or Nothing
	Helen Montague Foster	For a Patient…
	Michael Fulop	The End of the Old Woman
	Kate Gleason	While Reading Scientific American…
	Tony Gloeggler	Trading Places or Out Among…
	Forrest Hamer	A Poem Also About Duplicity
		A Poem Also About the…
	Donna C. Henderson	To Tinnitus
	Diane Klammer	These Are the Rules
	Jerry Kraft	Such Music as This
	Perie Longo	Said
	Peter Marcus	The Boundaries
	Fran Markover	Addictions Counselor
	Ken Meisel	Psych Ward
	Glenn Morazzini	Where Do You Go?
	Gwenn A. Nusbaum	Hospital, Spring
	Renee Podunovich	This Poem Is Not About Me
	Jill Stein	Lunch with My Parents
	Charles Harper Webb	A Bad Way to Go
	Maryhelen Snyder	The Art of Waiting: The Parallels…
	Poetry
	Paul David Adkins	War Story #133: Helicopter Ride…
	Chris Anderson	The Junco and the Boy
	Ron Anderson	Fluid
	Cristin O’Keefe	Aptowicz Op-Ed for the Sad Sack…
	Ellen Bass	Gophers
	Craig Beaven	Arguments About the World
	Cindy Beebe	While I Am Driving in the Morning…
	Heather Bell	Urgent Care
	Marvin Bell	The Book of the Dead Man…
	Ace Boggess	“Can They Do That?”
	Marianne Boruch	When’s a Fork a Spoon
	Andrea Hollander Budy	Field Hospital
	Trent Busch	The Ordinary Man
	Mario Chard	The Barrel
	Thomas Cochran	Fishing
	Michael Diebert	Retail
	William Doreski	The Concerto I Composed…
	Jehanne Dubrow	Nowa Huta
	J.C. Ellefson	Last Words of Encouragement…
	Alan Fox	Vanished
	Jeffrey Franklin	Living Right
	Anne Haines	What This Poem Will Do
	Christopher Kempf	The Professors’ Wives
	Robert W. King	A Language
	Michael Kriesel	As Crickets Chip Away the Light
	Ilyse Kusnetz	Match Girls
	J.T. Ledbetter	Grandmother
	Gary Lemons	Missing in Action
	M	While My Mother Rots in Memory…
	David T. Manning	Not My World
	Michael Miller	The Invisible Life
	Peter Nash	Have You Seen My Son?
	William Neumire	Branches
	Harry Newman	Early Snow
	William O’Daly	To the Antiphonist, from Bill Nephele
	Matthew Olzmann	Rare Architecture
	Joel Peckham	Body Memory
	Doug Ramspeck	One True Poem
	Lauren Schmidt	Why I Am Not a Taxidermist
	Prartho Sereno	Mr. James’s Marvelous Thing
	John L. Stanizzi	Defiantly
	Sarah Pemberton	Strong Cold Tea
	Tim Suermondt	Graduation
	Mark Terrill	A Poem for Parking Lots
	Elizabeth Volpe	Loaves and Fishes
	Kathleen A. Wakefield	Relic
	Jesse Weiner	Salome
	Adam Michael Wright	Make a Wish Foundation
	Maya Jewell Zeller	My Grandmother’s Cow
	Poetry Prize Winner
	Patricia Smith	Tavern. Tavern. Church. Shuttered…
	Honorable Mentions
	Michele Battiste	Once More, with Feeling
	Heidi Garnett	Sin of Unrequited Love
	Valentina Gnup	We Speak of August
	francine j. harris	Katherine with the Lazy Eye. Short…
	Courtney Kampa	Avant-garde
		The Miscarriage
	Devon Miller-Duggan	Old Blue
	Andrew Nurkin	The Contest
	Laura Read	This Time We’ll Go to Kentucky…
	Scott Withiam	The Petty Snow
	Conversations
	Ted Kooser
	William O’Daly