Thursday, January 05, 2012

"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!




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