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    Girls on the Run: A Poem
    Girls on the Run: A Poem
    Girls on the Run: A Poem
    Ebook78 pages1 hour

    Girls on the Run: A Poem

    By John Ashbery

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    John Ashbery’s wild, deliriously inventive book-length poem, inspired by the adventures of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls

    Henry Darger, the prolific American outsider artist who died in 1973, leaving behind over twenty thousand pages of manuscripts and hundreds of artworks, is famous for the elaborate alternate universe he both constructed and inhabited, a “realm of the unreal” where a plucky band of young girls, the Vivians, helps lead an epic rebellion against dark forces of chaos. Darger’s work is now renowned for its brilliant appropriation of cultural ephemera, its dense and otherworldly prose, and its utterly unique high-low juxtaposition of popular culture and the divine—some of the very same traits that decades of critics and readers have responded to in John Ashbery’s many groundbreaking works of poetry.
     
    In Girls on the Run, Ashbery’s unmatched poetic inventiveness travels to new territory, inspired by the characters and cataclysms of Darger’s imagined universe. Girls on the Run is a disquieting, gorgeous, and often hilarious mash-up that finds two radical American artists engaged in an unlikely conversation, a dialogue of reinvention and strange beauty. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781480459137
    Girls on the Run: A Poem
    Author

    John Ashbery

    <p><strong>John Ashbery </strong>was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, including <em>Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; </em>and <em>Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, </em>which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House, in 2012. Ashbery died in September 2017 at the age of ninety.</p>

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    Reviews for Girls on the Run

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Ashbery is usually interesting, sometimes revelatory. Here his "subject" is the strange world of "outsider" artist Henry Darger and in particular Darger's bizarre life-work _In the Realms of the Unreal_. It's hard not to like this, but I don't remember anything in particular about it, either. Probably worth a re-read.
    • 4/5
      Girls on the Run is Ashbery's homage to outsider artist, Henry Darger, now famous for a posthumously discovered 15,000 page fantasy manuscript titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion and its hundreds of drawings and illustrations.The poem is a dream-like surrealist sort-of narrative that evokes, in a kind-of ekphrastic way, Darger's illustrations. I really have no idea what it's about or what Ashbery was trying to achieve. I have a feeling if one read the poem a dozen times or so and was much more familiar with Darger's work than I am, some kind of tenuous meaning could be teased out. But I'm afraid I don't have the patience for that.There is some lovely, wonderlandish language, however:Other dreams.Judy the petulant watered her flowersfrom a sprinkling can, and the rose hurtled into bloom.My message is it's all right to go on, it said.Sure enough daisies and yellowbirds paired off in the peace of the moment,which is to be lasting, but someone unearthed the old sawon the gravel beach. "We can't use this." No but we'll go over the topand down into the wrinkle on the other side, you'll see.So they did what was natural and becoming and all were satisfiedand rewarded. And someshall be excused, and other have to go and wait on the border for it.And we should come nearer, it's warmer,if we want to, only on that other sidewhich seems so far away from us, but alas is too nearalmost to count. With that the hedgerow winkedgood-humoredly, and they stand, they standunimpressed but interested perhapseven today, and that's the gist of it.And I did have vividly impressionistic dreams the night I finished the poem.
    • 4/5
      Ashbery is usually interesting, sometimes revelatory. Here his "subject" is the strange world of "outsider" artist Henry Darger and in particular Darger's bizarre life-work _In the Realms of the Unreal_. It's hard not to like this, but I don't remember anything in particular about it, either. Probably worth a re-read.
    • 4/5
      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.

    Book preview

    Girls on the Run - John Ashbery

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    Girls on the Run

    A Poem

    John Ashbery

    Publisher’s Note

    Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

    But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page. Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?

    In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.

    But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.

    Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s Disclaimer as it appears in two different type sizes.

         

    Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of Disclaimer, you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading Disclaimer on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead is a complete line, while the phrase you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn is not.

    Open Road has adopted an

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