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105 The greatest poverty is not to live in Poughkeepsie, to wear a fleece blanket against a diner’s airconditioning , to ride a motorcycle shirtlessly and helmetlessly along a sidewalk beneath blighted maples: how long till you succumb to the accidental nature of nature, your own nature, spaces to fill in later: a naked torso over an engine, a folk song of fire escapes and bottlecaps: you can’t live here and I can’t leave, but you can come down for a weekend of inaccurate impulses amid an overperfumed mall’s bodily distortions, the rough housing of foggy suburbs and the mutually assured ruin of every qualified sense “The greatest poverty is not to live / in” is taken from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Esthétique du Mal.” JOSHUA HARMON FROM “LE SPLEEN DE POUGHKEEPSIE” ...

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