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Girls on the Run: A Poem
The Barnes & Noble Review
John Ashbery is one of the most celebrated of all living American poets. During his long and prolific career, he has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; been named a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets; and presented Norton lectures at Harvard, when not serving as tenured professor at Bard College.
John Ashbery is one of the most celebrated of all living American poets. During his long and prolific career, he has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; been named a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets; and presented Norton lectures at Harvard, when not serving as tenured professor at Bard College.
If Ashbery's latest work reveals one thing, it is that the 71-year-old poet is not content to rest on his laurels: Girls on the Run is boldly inventive and innovative, a lush, surreal romp through language. The book comprises a single poem based loosely on quintessential outsider artist Henry Darger's (1892-1972) illustrated adventures of a band of plucky little girls called the Vivians. Ashbery populates his narrative with characters such as Persnickety Peggy, Tootles, Rags the mutt, Uncle Margaret, and General Metuchen children's book figures with an Ashbery twist. This warping of the juvenile characters, coupled with the employment of their naïve perspective, brings an ominous and disturbing twist to the poem.
This provides the perfect backdrop for what Ashbery intends to convey. His genius in selecting Darger as a model lies in the ability of the material to reflect the metaphysical complexity of the postmodern condition. For example, whereas Darger traced his figures from comic strips, coloring books, and other equally eclectic and ephemeral sources, Ashbery draws deeply upon the clichés and imagery of modern life, from advertising jinglestocontemporary academic jargon:
We so enjoyed having salt to sprinkle on the meat, until it seemed align=center none of us
could be a worker or
welfare recipient.
Cashing in on the laughs in the alley,
Melinda strums a thighbone guitar, the rest are off
in the distance.
Daytime drowsiness, dizziness, headache, nausea, stomach upset,
vomiting, diarrhea, lightheadedness, muscle
aches and dry mouth may occur
so long as we are in unreasoning variation to one another,
which might be repaired by dawn's unsealing the tips
of tall buildings, so they sway to and fro,
in time with the maker's rhythm. He had a plan
but it was too late to use it.
Within his edgy, macabre system, Ashbery probes the faultlines of existence. Which childhood presumptions of safety, fairness, and progress have been contradicted or abandoned? Which truths of traditional or modern ways of life have been shattered in the disjunctive postmodern world? Ashbery's answer arises out of the deft overlapping of endless non-sequiturs, seemingly mismatched in tone and object.
Girls on the Run has been compared to the work of T. S. Eliot, and it is easy to see why. In The Waste Land, Eliot brought unlike voices and eclectic sources into collision to reflect the state of affairs in the post-World War I Western world. Yet while Eliot's method could be likened to mosaic, forming a unified picture out of disparate bits, Ashbery's Girls on the Run is more collage, a composition of superimposed fragments from a vertiginous literary junkpile.
Monica Ferrell
55 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
14 people are currently reading
333 people want to read
About the author
John Ashbery
290 books479 followersFormal experimentation and connection to visual art of noted American poet John Ashbery of the original writers of New York School won a Pulitzer Prize for
Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror
(1975).
From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.
From Harvard and Columbia, John Ashbery earned degrees, and he traveled of James William Fulbright to France in 1955. He published more than twenty best known collections, most recently A Worldly Country (2007). Wystan Hugh Auden selected early Some Trees for the younger series of Elihu Yale, and he later obtained the major national book award and the critics circle. He served as executive editor of Art News and as the critic for magazine and Newsweek. A member of the academies of letters and sciences, he served as chancellor from 1988 to 1999. He received many awards internationally and fellowships of John Simon Guggenheim and John Donald MacArthur from 1985 to 1990. People translated his work into more than twenty languages. He lived and from 1990 served as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. professor of languages and literature at Bard college.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
February 26, 2009
i don't read a lot of modern poetry, and this is why: it confuses me. i don't know what's happening. images rush by, some of them feel like something, others don't, nothing seems to really add up to anything, i get the feeling i could chop out half the lines and nothing would change, or i could add in a bunch of other lines, maybe lines from elsewhere in the poem, and nothing would change, or i could read the poem backwards, or upside down, etc...
that being said, there is a kind of delightful crispness to ashbery's writing which i enjoyed even as i confusedly turned the pages and wished i was much smarter or he was much more interested in me.
(this is a book-length poem based on the crazy art/writings of henry darger, btw.)
favorite parts:
New creatures fly past, out of the starting gate forever. The pink boomerang returns
to home base, flutters, settles in the dust.
....
Count the dogs as furniture
as otherwise there will be no chairs.
but this channeling of richard brautigan was by far my favorite:
Out in Michigan, or was it Minnesota, though, time had stopped
to see what it could see, which wasn't much. A recent hooligan scare had blighted the landscape,
lowering the temperature by several degrees.
ah, richard brautigan... where did i put you?
that being said, there is a kind of delightful crispness to ashbery's writing which i enjoyed even as i confusedly turned the pages and wished i was much smarter or he was much more interested in me.
(this is a book-length poem based on the crazy art/writings of henry darger, btw.)
favorite parts:
New creatures fly past, out of the starting gate forever. The pink boomerang returns
to home base, flutters, settles in the dust.
....
Count the dogs as furniture
as otherwise there will be no chairs.
but this channeling of richard brautigan was by far my favorite:
Out in Michigan, or was it Minnesota, though, time had stopped
to see what it could see, which wasn't much. A recent hooligan scare had blighted the landscape,
lowering the temperature by several degrees.
ah, richard brautigan... where did i put you?
Read
June 9, 2022Here he is again Girls on the Run is not a collection but one long poem so naturally it feels rather cohesive so far as that exists for JA - but it's beautiful. If I do things right this summer JA may end up being my most read author ever he's damnably prolific I suppose writing a poem every day does that. Anyway. This is a great collection have a go maybe
October 2, 2017
Surreal in tone, slippery in meaning, vague and intangible in imagery. This book-length poem faded in and out of grasp for me. Phrases would arrest me and I would re-read a passage only to have meaning slip away or come back unfamiliar. A very few phrases endured. Among these:
"So how was
I to know who to stand up to, when to turn abrasive, when all things nestled,
equidistant, all hearts were charming, and it was good to be natural and sincere?
True, we had much to worry about,
other things to think about, but when has mankind had the leisure
to distract himself from these and other unassailable syllogisms?
So the truth just washed up on the shore,
a bundle of nerves, not resembling much of anything
we cared to remember."
"Then you should go out,
your dress will be as morning to the cows,
she said. And he did and it was."
"Our phrase books began to feel useless--for once
you have learned a language, what is there to do but forget it?
An illustration changes us."
The first half (2/3rds?) of the poem was richer in these moments and meaning than the more pessimistic and declining last sections. Tone? Turns of phrase? The fatigue and attentiveness of the reader?
More than most texts, what the reader brings to the text makes up a large part of what can be taken from it.
"So how was
I to know who to stand up to, when to turn abrasive, when all things nestled,
equidistant, all hearts were charming, and it was good to be natural and sincere?
True, we had much to worry about,
other things to think about, but when has mankind had the leisure
to distract himself from these and other unassailable syllogisms?
So the truth just washed up on the shore,
a bundle of nerves, not resembling much of anything
we cared to remember."
"Then you should go out,
your dress will be as morning to the cows,
she said. And he did and it was."
"Our phrase books began to feel useless--for once
you have learned a language, what is there to do but forget it?
An illustration changes us."
The first half (2/3rds?) of the poem was richer in these moments and meaning than the more pessimistic and declining last sections. Tone? Turns of phrase? The fatigue and attentiveness of the reader?
More than most texts, what the reader brings to the text makes up a large part of what can be taken from it.
April 7, 2014
the voice of the manchild filtered through the mind of an evasive genius
April 17, 2020
Not my bag.
December 6, 2020
I used to suffer dreadfully from insomnia at university but since then have managed to find a way to get to sleep in double-quick time. What I do, is I make sure I don’t need a wee, I get comfy, I close my eyes and I watch the pictures. These pictures aren’t ones I consciously conjure, for them to work I have to take no ownership of them whatsoever; I shouldn’t try and put them in words, fix them in my mind or even acknowledge them, I just watch them and let them flow. This poem is a bit like that but with words and I let them flow in a similar manner.
A lot of the poem seemed to me about time. There were references to time as a concept but also many to seasons, to times of the day and to the movement of the sun. It seemed to me that time stopped a lot in the text and was rekindled like a fire. The characters in this (and there do seem to be some) have joy, they have fun, they have seasons in the sun. Time is also often linked to play;
“It was just play, they dreamed
tomorrow will be another day and different”
The act of playing stops time, or at the very least stretches it and pulls it into weird shapes, which it does in real life. You can play as a baby; an old man, a young woman, a game set in the future or one set in the past.. years can stretch by yet all fit in before being called in for dinner. That’s what this poem felt like to me, snatches of half-remembered play and memories swirling around each other.
I also know a little about Henry Darger and his work ‘In the Realms of Unreality’, which inspired this work - so there were times when certain images were clearly inspired from one picture or another. There are specific details like an oversized clock with the hands pointing at 5:30 which feel they are taken from a particular image. The poem also reminded me a little of when preschool children pick up a picture book and ‘read’ it. Unhampered by the words they voice the feelings of the pictures, describe what’s going on and frequently go on tangents.
The text was very slippery. There was a lot of playing with pronouns, the characters slipping between them in a swirl. Often the last word of a line meant one thing with that line, but meant something else if put with the line proceeding;
“All had come undone
from Brigit’s shorts”
-is the ‘undone’ here part of a cataclysm as implied by the first line or a wardrobe malfunction as implied by the second?
Usually, I prefer something that wants to be more clearly understood and this kind of writing is not my favourite. I tend to feel that I, as a reader, am doing all the work in this relationship and so resent the author. While I probably enjoyed their flow for the first 25 pages or so, the last 10 or so did become white noise. Perhaps I should have read one of the 21 chapters a day, and if I return to this book (which I may) that’s how I shall do it.
A lot of the poem seemed to me about time. There were references to time as a concept but also many to seasons, to times of the day and to the movement of the sun. It seemed to me that time stopped a lot in the text and was rekindled like a fire. The characters in this (and there do seem to be some) have joy, they have fun, they have seasons in the sun. Time is also often linked to play;
“It was just play, they dreamed
tomorrow will be another day and different”
The act of playing stops time, or at the very least stretches it and pulls it into weird shapes, which it does in real life. You can play as a baby; an old man, a young woman, a game set in the future or one set in the past.. years can stretch by yet all fit in before being called in for dinner. That’s what this poem felt like to me, snatches of half-remembered play and memories swirling around each other.
I also know a little about Henry Darger and his work ‘In the Realms of Unreality’, which inspired this work - so there were times when certain images were clearly inspired from one picture or another. There are specific details like an oversized clock with the hands pointing at 5:30 which feel they are taken from a particular image. The poem also reminded me a little of when preschool children pick up a picture book and ‘read’ it. Unhampered by the words they voice the feelings of the pictures, describe what’s going on and frequently go on tangents.
The text was very slippery. There was a lot of playing with pronouns, the characters slipping between them in a swirl. Often the last word of a line meant one thing with that line, but meant something else if put with the line proceeding;
“All had come undone
from Brigit’s shorts”
-is the ‘undone’ here part of a cataclysm as implied by the first line or a wardrobe malfunction as implied by the second?
Usually, I prefer something that wants to be more clearly understood and this kind of writing is not my favourite. I tend to feel that I, as a reader, am doing all the work in this relationship and so resent the author. While I probably enjoyed their flow for the first 25 pages or so, the last 10 or so did become white noise. Perhaps I should have read one of the 21 chapters a day, and if I return to this book (which I may) that’s how I shall do it.
February 21, 2008
It aint the best Ashbery I've read. Something about it is itchy and something else is whimsical, but joyless in its whimsy which is difficult and not pleasing and I'm trying to decide if that's the way it's supposed to be or if the whole thing's a distance from the center, so to read it is superficial.
October 8, 2014
Ashbery at his most frivolous?
It reminds me of DeKooning's late (Alzheimer?) paintings, which I love. There's a similar lack of subject matter (of course the poem has a subject, with characters even, but still it's more a vehicle for Ashbery's lack of subject(!)), but lightness of colorful touch.
It reminds me of DeKooning's late (Alzheimer?) paintings, which I love. There's a similar lack of subject matter (of course the poem has a subject, with characters even, but still it's more a vehicle for Ashbery's lack of subject(!)), but lightness of colorful touch.
January 30, 2009
way fantastic & way underrated. dig.
May 19, 2022
“But wait till my ambition / comes a cropper, whatever that means, or bursts into feathered bloom / and burns on the shore.”
February 22, 2025
The dust jacket for John Ashbery's Girls on the Run advertising the book as being inspired by the outsider artist Henry Darger's illustrated (and unpublished) novel about menaced little girls. In his review of Ashbery's book in the Boston Review, John D'Agata notes that critics have called Darger's novel "impenetrable," a term that can also be used to describe Ashbery's book-length poem. There are moments of intelligibility here and there, but the poem feels very much like a stream-of-consciousness verbal collage that, in fits and starts, tries to develop a narrative that never quite coheres. Some of Ashbery's lines are wonderful and witty, but others are a mashup of images that surely only the author could ever understand. Perhaps understanding is beside the point, and perhaps the fitful narrative moments are lures intended to tease and then confront the reader with the futility of seeking understanding in the first place. Who knows? It is difficult to care, to be honest. Despite its flashes of brilliance, I doubt I will be able to remember much about this book after posting this review. It is simply too evanescent and vague to be remembered.
D'Agata writes about the poem at length here.
D'Agata writes about the poem at length here.
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November 12, 2024“A cheer went up, for it was recognized that these are lousy times
to be living in, yet we do live in them:
We are the case.
And seven times seven ages later it would still be the truth in appearances,
festive, eternal, misconstrued. Does anyone still want to play?”
to be living in, yet we do live in them:
We are the case.
And seven times seven ages later it would still be the truth in appearances,
festive, eternal, misconstrued. Does anyone still want to play?”
September 24, 2021
Beautifully written, but I didn’t get it.
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October 21, 2024Ugh outsider art. Whatever.
November 13, 2021
Uno de los mejores poemas de Ashbery, y un bello ejercicio, para los poco afortunados que no podemos terminar de acercarnos a la obra de Darger, en imaginación. La recomendación es leerlo estando mínimamente familiarizado con la historia de las Vivian Girls.
February 8, 2009
I didn't like this when it came out, but after seeing "In the Realms of the Unreal,"
I reread it and now it all makes...sense? The Ashberyan kind of sense, "toying
with anagrams while the real message is being written in the stars."
"Now, though,
when it came time to vote for who the deed was done
by,the others mattered, too...
"adults who have turned the steep corner into childhood...
"no two people can take love into their own hands..."
"Some had come unconvinced about the importance
of this daydream in which they were all entombed...
Now let me sink into my minutest crevices."
I reread it and now it all makes...sense? The Ashberyan kind of sense, "toying
with anagrams while the real message is being written in the stars."
"Now, though,
when it came time to vote for who the deed was done
by,the others mattered, too...
"adults who have turned the steep corner into childhood...
"no two people can take love into their own hands..."
"Some had come unconvinced about the importance
of this daydream in which they were all entombed...
Now let me sink into my minutest crevices."
December 19, 2008
I admire Ashbery, even if I don't always understand him. *Girls on the Run* is one book length poem in sections, a form I've never tried and that is ambitious. The poem unfolds almost as if it was a series of dreams, the the same kind of shape-shifting emotional landscape of dreamworlds. The poem also mimics the kind of style and language of a child's storybook, and it cascades through each section in a fit of wild inventiveness.
Reading this poem, as many Ashbery poems are prone to do, make me want to write, which, I suppose, is a good compliment indeed.
Reading this poem, as many Ashbery poems are prone to do, make me want to write, which, I suppose, is a good compliment indeed.
April 27, 2011
"They danced, and became meaningful to each other. It was cosmic time, tasting of grit. If this is a mutual admiration society, why not?"
"It was like everywhere. It was just average."
I wanted more of this, and in this way the poem is lacking something great. It is a little all over the place, and does not seem to accentuate the loveliness of Darger's work. There is not much connection at all.
"It was like everywhere. It was just average."
I wanted more of this, and in this way the poem is lacking something great. It is a little all over the place, and does not seem to accentuate the loveliness of Darger's work. There is not much connection at all.
September 28, 2008
This epic poem is based on a series of paintings by Henry Darger. While the paintings range from bizarre to disturbing, the poem proves that they were endlessly inspiring. The poem in turn has influenced my own writing tremendously - "green like an elephant's" because he's either an Expressionist or Babar's father. Isn't that guy running for president?
October 7, 2010
Another book I'm reading for my Film Studies course. Although I very much enjoyed Henry Darger's art and life story, it is not easy to see the connections between Ashberry's poem and Darger - with the exception of little isolated bits and pieces ...
August 27, 2012
This is probably my favorite Ashbery; Darger's art meshes very well with Ashbery's poetics, and it makes the structures that Ashbery is playing within and against more apparent. It's surprisingly fun and even, at times, silly for Ashbery.
July 22, 2007
It was just too much. Nothing came together. When I read poetry, I expect something larger, but this just left me muddled
December 18, 2008
fantasy/surreal
journey
henry darger
paintings
journey
henry darger
paintings
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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July 11, 2008it was a gift from serena
i read it and think of her
i read it and think of her
January 7, 2012
John, you make my period rounder...
August 20, 2012
at times difficult to follow, but really great use of language
October 26, 2012
One of Ashbery's seminal books centering around the themes of childhood and outsider art. As always, Ashbery is inventive with his language and his use of strong visual imagery.
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April 5, 2013811.54 A8198g 1999
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews