I love the way John Haines, in his writing, embraces the particular detail while also recognizing how these details are caressed and held in the larger, mythic, reality. This is what I am aiming for.

I have come to feel that there is here in North America a hidden place obscured by what we have built upon it, and that whenever we penetrate the surface of the life around us that place and its spirit can be found. It is in Alaska, it is in Montana with its landscape of mountain and cloud, plain and water; it is there in the arid foothills of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties in California, in the brooding tableland of New Mexico, and in other places I have seen. And each of these landscapes adds something to the sum of what we know and what we are.

The place is also within us, corresponding to some dreamscape which is in essence everywhere; a gathering of all the places we have seen and lived in, and some we haven’t. The forms to be found there, various and unique, yield their meaning to one who lives by the ocean, among the mountains, or beside a river. We are penetrated by these things, intruded upon, and made into what we are or can be. Much of the best of what I have written has been saturated with landscape. I have been led by this and other realizations to feel that there are always two places, dream and actual life. When the two are brought together by an act of imagination there occur those sometimes brief moments of compelling clarity and completeness. And these moments are, or ought to be, part of the real life of humankind: place and image, reality and dream made one.

— John Haines, Living Off the Country: Essays on Poetry and Place