Naming Creatures: We Are all Ecopoets Now

“Naming Creatures” is a lyric essay that combines an examination of the landscape, wildlife, and history (including geologic history) around and in the diminishing Great Salt Lake; the Robert Smithson earthwork Spiral Jetty, which uses the lake as its setting; the author’s own personal relationship with the lake and her involvement with and writing about that and other landscapes; and a consideration of the ethics of “nature” writing from the Romantics to the present and how ethical considerations might inflect our poetic practices. It uses as its context a meditation about deep time and the place of humans within it.