“Brenda Hillman’s Ecopoetic Playing”

A return to Winnicott, asking the ecopoetics community to consider the psychoanalytic insight that having an environment can, in itself, be existentially unsettling. How poetic playfulness can be a kind of development, or even progress, from this experience.

Hillman was my teacher and gave me a strong word of advice: make room for the irrational in your poetry. As an idea of where I should work to be, given my temperament and values, nothing could have been less helpful. And holding myself to that expectation, in vogue for years, delayed my publishing for a few years. But thinking about the irrational, respecting it, allowing it to exist among other elements — very helpful.