Seven Places in America: A Poetic Sojourn is a collection of poetry by Miriam Sagan based on seven journeys in the U.S. in search of remoteness, solitude, and inspiration.
Sagan was an artist in residence in two National Parks, living in a cabin as the sole after dark occupant in Petrified Forest National Park and in Everglades park housing in a neighborhood of slash pines, vultures, and snow globes. National Parks are iconic--they tell us what to look at--and the poems in park settings also look sidewise to include a tourist, a butterfly, or a cup of coffee as well as a panorama.
A residency at Andrews Experimental Forest in the Cascades includes the focus of the Ecological Reflections program--where every writer explores fixed sites, including old growth forest and a logged area. Here the poems also range into dreams, Chinese poets, and the notion of compost--both physical and creative.
Two very different but analagous sculpture parks are also settings. Stone Quarry Hill in upstate New York yielded a poetry guide to the sculptures and also history of the area. Poems written at The Land/An Art Site in remote central New Mexico range from lonesome freight train whistles to avant-garde installations.
Rivers run through this book as well. The Ohio and Mississippi are dotted with ancient archeological mounds that are explored in poems about the intersection between archaic underworlds and modern settings such as malls and gold courses. And just outside the poet's door the Santa Fe River runs from watershed to the village of Agua Fria, allowing for reflections on personal history and ecology closer to home.
Each section of the book is introduced by an essay on the residency, including some housekeeping questions, such as where is the nearest jelly doughnut? Seven Places in America is about location, borders, beauty, destruction--and the poet in the landscape.