Don't feel nostalgia for hypotenuses, <br />or when I see a tangent get a hard-on, <br />but when I fart I’m square and make excuses <br />and, radiating, say: “I beg your pardon.” <br /> <br /> <br />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: <br /> <br />He’s bought himself a shirt the color of Sam Rayburn Lake, <br />Muddled ocher by stumps and land practices. Picknicking prisoners <br />never fail to enjoy the musk that drifts off it <br />in ever-thickening waves, <br />triggering bloody nostalgia for a hypotenuse that never was. <br /> <br />12/3/00<br /><br />gershon hepner<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/farting/
