''Girls on the Run'' is a long poem by the American writer
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic.
Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in ...
, published in its own volume in 1999. The narrative centers on a group of girls known as the Vivians, who try to create an ideal world for themselves. The poem was inspired by the works of
Henry Darger, a Chicago-based
outsider artist who, among other things, collected street waste, compiled various catalogues, and wrote a massive fantasy novel.
Reception
David Kirby of ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' described ''Girls on the Run'' as "a tank of literary
laughing gas that exhilarates and confounds in roughly equal measure." Kirby wrote that "the excitement stays just below the level of
video-arcade intensity, thanks to the anesthesizing influence of a narrator who is both wide-eyed and disembodied ...If
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...
and
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 18884 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor.Bush, Ronald. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds), ''American National Biogr ...
had played with
Barbies together, the result might have been something like the adventures of Dimples, Shuffle, Tidbit and the rest of the Vivians: theirs is a world of the eternal present, a place where the ordinary is nifty and vice versa, and any possibility of a tight ending scampers away into a candy-colored sunset."
John D'Agata
John D’Agata (born 1975) is an American essayist. He is the author or editor of six books of nonfiction, including ''The Next American Essay'' (2003), ''The Lost Origins of the Essay'' (2009) and ''The Making of the American Essay''—all part ...
reviewed the book in ''
Boston Review'': "There is an innocence to reading this new book that readers may have long felt the presence of in past books by Ashbery; but like the surreal physical landscape in this particular poem, it is an innocence that feels also long out of reach. Like
Henry Darger's obsessive (some would say phallocentric) cataloguing of kinds of tornadoes, military ranks, flags of the world, or ways to kill a girl, John Ashbery's proclivities for lists, long sentences, and ambiguous grammar is a trademark system for distorting reality–but all in an effort to dig closer to the real. Indeed, as one critic recently called the poet's slippery tactics: 'It is a fear of death ... death without a comforting narrative for reproductive continuation.'"
See also
*
1999 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).
Events
* 1 May 1999 — Andrew Motion becomes Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom for 10 years
* 1 July 1999 — Scotland's ...
*
American literature
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States of America and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition thus is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but also inc ...
References
1999 poetry books
1999 poems
Poetry by John Ashbery
American poems
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