num_pages: 55
description: The Barnes &amp; Noble ReviewJohn 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
language: English
title: Girls on the Run: A Poem
titlecomplete: Girls on the Run: A Poem
genres: 20th Century, Literature, Art, Poetry
ratings_count: 349
publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux