"[O]nce a city sickens it is very, very hard to reverse the decline"

Ellen Wehle reviews Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie at West Branch:

Throughout Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie the speaker is recessive, a photographer who has no interest in making himself the subject of his pictures. We sense his presence behind the camera, but that's all. One prose poem includes the line "A kick-ass attentiveness bunny- / hops the curb," and if forced to sum up Harmon's m.o., I'd say "kick-ass attentiveness" pretty much covers it. He overlooks nothing, notices everything, and by his recall makes even the tiniest details worth notice.

"Everybody loves street"

The new issue of Gently Read Literature features Poppy Samuels's review of Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie:

Unlike the backwards-looking Baudelaire, the poems in Harmon's collection do not seem to track the speaker-poet as a social misfit incapable of transcendence; rather he's a pseudo-naïve participant cast into trance, spellbound into visions, willing to voyage wherever the trip takes him. However, I'm not suggesting that this is a poetry concerned with transcendence or whatever. It's not. No, the speaker-poet still shares his work with the voyeur, the stroller, the lounger, keeping himself at a remove. (Remember, we're always reminded of the frame.) But what's compelling here is the force and determination of his spell. The poems interest themselves in something closer to the friction-joy that comes from walking around and looking: the imagination working so hard it smokes!

"slow-release revelations"

Dora Malech reviews Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie as part of On the Seawall's annual fall feature, Twenty Poets Recommend New & Recent Titles: "[T]hough this is not a book that fetishizes poverty or decay," Malech writes, "it constantly asks us to reexamine the imperfect and the transient":

Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie reads like an elegiac mosaic. Refusing to culminate in solace, the terminus of a classical elegy’s arc, this collection “is context / not event,” as it accretes moment upon moment of mourning and consolation, taking the reader not to a tourist destination, but inside a life lived and a place observed. We inhabit the “absentminded particulars of ruin” in this post-industrial American city, paradoxically universal in its specificity.

the aesthete's point of view, pt. 2

Two recent reviews (and one not-so-recent review) of Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie:

Donna Stonecipher, in Rain Taxi:

In Joshua Harmon’s second book of poems, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, there is an eager dwelling upon appearances, an engrossment in surfaces: the book is an enactment of Geertz’s aesthetic perspective on life as applied to the ugly—degraded, impure, deeply compromised—surfaces of Poughkeepsie, New York. Beauty, every aesthete’s object of desire, is an exhausted property in Poughkeepsie, a small American city...compromised by the assaults of 20th-century material culture’s relentless pursuit of profit in all its forms. But whereas in the 1840s Charles Baudelaire wrote Le Spleen de Paris in stripped-down prose poems that served, in Walter Benjamin’s estimation, as a tacit acknowledgment of the end of the lyric, Harmon’s spleen goes in the opposite direction; in both free-verse and prose poem forms, he uses lyric’s heightened capacity for beauty to detail Poughkeepsie’s ugliness in defiantly beautiful formulations (e.g., “a diminishment / of light scrolls upward / like a screen flickering from overload or vast / swirls of starlings, errant e-mails caught in / a bramble of downed wires”).

Djelloul Marbrook, in Chronogram's fall poetry roundup:

“Spleen” has at least five meanings in French and English, and [Joshua] Harmon explores them all, keeping Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris in mind, while describing the ineffable loneliness of a hard-luck city...

Charlotte Seley, at the Vernacular Literary Blog:

[Harmon] addresses the city perhaps as no one else has in Poughkeepsie’s history. A city that suffers from failed attempts of gentrification and revitalization (“Can we imagine another world? Pity keeps it going.”), there has not yet been a solid solution nor has anyone acknowledged the morsels of obscured beauty lodged in its make-up. The solution may always have been to speak to the city itself...

And a recent review of Scape, by Ezekiel Black in iO:

The book, like the speaker who attempts to travel the drift lines, those paths of least resistance, despite the snow, walks terra incognita, and thus, Harmon is a cartographer trying to reconcile the known and unknown land, trying to answer the question “Whither are we bound?”

Poughkeepsie during the reign:

"Hooker Avenue Serenade," one of the poems from Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, was featured on Verse Daily yesterday.










[Images courtesy Google Maps and the notebook in which I wrote the notes and drafts for Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie]

two reviews of Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie has been reviewed by Anya Groner at The Rumpus and by Nick Sturm at Barn Owl Review.

Groner warns that the book is "oppressive," but adds that

[t]his harsh, post-industrial landscape is mitigated by gorgeous lyricism. Using a combination of prose poems and harshly enjambed verse, Harmon creates hypnotic rhythms and occasionally lapses into delightful sound play: “in lawful ground, last / leaf-lace, light of flat / screen.” The tension produced is tremendous. Harmon’s images paint Poughkeepsie as a sort of measured hell, while his lyricism betrays begrudged tenderness, an unwanted nostalgia.

Sturm, like Groner, puts the book "[i]n dialogue with Baudelaire, who was appalled by the intensification of the inhuman forces of modernization, especially by its effects on the poor," and adds that

Harmon is witness to the shocking aftereffects of what it means to forget that we are human, and that our ability to ruin the environment and ourselves can so easily escape our control. Through Harmon’s precise, charged enjambments and attention to syntax, these poems blur class, nature, language, technology, and the remnants of mercy into a post-pastoral fight for survival.

As ever, I am thrilled by such careful and generous readings.

The Poughkeepsiad

My chapbook, The Poughkeepsiad, containing the title poem and some of the "Tableaux Poughkeepsiens" from the full series in Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, is just out from The Greying Ghost Press. I can highly recommend the other Greying Ghost books, too.

advance comment on Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

Perhaps it will come to pass that Poughkeepsie, the small city on the Hudson, will be known as the capital of the 21st century. For Joshua Harmon, it has provided a terrain of nearly unbearable enjambment, where nature twines with the present ghosts of a humanity living amid the ruins of material culture. Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie is a relentlessly affecting, brilliantly observed, beautiful and sober inventory of modernity's ragged edge.  

—Ann Lauterbach


"If you're not part of the problem, / you're part of the lengthening / tragedy": Joshua Harmon's gorgeous language enacts visionary social space, asks us to live, and more than that, asks us to be willing to live "on the outskirts of the absurd / attention to the material life." Here we are, with a brilliant guide who teaches us that "our own kingdom goes, / unaccountably" and that we are "no one / but singular / soul's monologues / spit over salt." Harmon calls his vision "a memoir of disintegration," but it is much more than that. It is necessary. American poetry needs this voice. American poetry needs this book.

—Joseph Lease


Joshua Harmon is the flâneur of Poughkeepsie, and Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie is what happened after the crowds dispersed, and those that were left in the basements, on the front porches, and in the aisles of convenience stores couldn’t figure out anywhere else to go. Disgusted, Baudelaire wanted to be “anywhere out of the world.” To which Harmon asks, “Can we imagine another world?” leaving the question dangling in the dirty air. For him, “the insufferable inching toward wreckage” is proof enough that we haven’t yet hit bottom, and perhaps that is all one needs to know to keep going. This is a book of particulars, of looking at (and remembering) everything, from “The quiet streets of meth / dispensaries closed / for the holiday / weekend” to “the blood on the billboard.” The brilliance is in the details.

—John Yau

Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie pre-orders

Discounted pre-orders for Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie are now available at Amazon, for both the simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions.

Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie

My next book of poems, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie, has been awarded the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize by judge G.C. Waldrep, who wrote the following about the book:

A tender anti-epic, a grunge-tinged love song to America's benighted post-industrial heartland. Harmon's Poughkeepsie shimmers just beyond the borders of banal recognition.  "If you're not part of the problem, / you're part of the lengthening / tragedy," Harmon writes in an introductory pastoral, seeking out "the stray / detours and workarounds of the secret / city inside the more obvious one...on the outskirts of the absurd / attention to the material life."  Poughkeepsie is that city of the heart where no one can look at anyone else "alone," where "the noise of beauty" is a cop's bullet polishing off a "traffic-struck doe," where "five dollars takes you anywhere in this town / except out of it." Harmon seeks not so much to locate aesthetic value within this terrain of loss and longing as to implicate the reader's sentimental collusion with a landscape forever slipping away from its own inhabitants, where even the trees are "evasions." His superb eye catches the telling moments we might otherwise miss, "the lack of affect in an oversized raccoon / examining the ruin," the "abandoned / railway bridge spanning...value / and use," "the doorway another woman / ducks into to fix a flame to the end / of a cigarette like all the misunderstood pleasures / of color."

Some poems from the collection have appeared online here, here, here, here, here, and here. A chapbook of some of the poems is also forthcoming from the awesome Greying Ghost Press.