Farting Poem by gershon hepner

Don't feel nostalgia for hypotenuses,
or when I see a tangent get a hard-on,
but when I fart I’m square and make excuses
and, radiating, say: “I beg your pardon.”


Charles Simic reviews “Your Name is Here” and “Other Traditions” (“Tragicomic Soup, ” TNR, November 20,2000) reviews two books by John Ashbery (“Your Name Here and “Other Traditions”) . He writes that some suggestive bits from “Other Traditions” describe what reading an Ashbery poem feels like. “Inspired bricolage.” “She made her poetry a record of her mind becoming aware of itself.” “What we are left with is a bouquet of many layered, splintered meanings to be clasped but never fully understood.” One poem he quotes is called “Bloodfits, ” which ends with the lines:

He’s bought himself a shirt the color of Sam Rayburn Lake,
Muddled ocher by stumps and land practices. Picknicking prisoners
never fail to enjoy the musk that drifts off it
in ever-thickening waves,
triggering bloody nostalgia for a hypotenuse that never was.

12/3/00