Girls on the Run

A Poem

John Ashbery

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780374526979
• eBook ISBN: 9781480459137
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía americana

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. 

Girls on the Run

after Henry Darger

I

A great plane flew across the sun,

and the girls ran along the ground.

The sun shone on Mr. McPlaster’s face, it was green like an elephant’s.

Let’s get out of here, Judy said.

They’re getting closer, I can’t stand it.

But you know, our fashions are in fashion

only briefly, then they go out

and stay that way for a long time. Then they come back in

for a while. Then, in maybe a million years, they go out of fashion

and stay there.

Laure and Tidbit agreed,

with the proviso that after that everyone would become fashion

again for a few hours. Write it now, Tidbit said,

before they get back. And, quivering, I took the pen.

Drink the beautiful tea

before you slop sewage over the horizon, the Principal directed.

OK, it’s calm now, but it wasn’t two minutes ago. What do you want me to do, said Henry,

I am no longer your serf,

and if I was I wouldn’t do your bidding. That is enough, sir.

You think you can lord it over every last dish of oatmeal

on this planet, Henry said. But wait till my ambition

comes a cropper, whatever that means, or bursts into feathered bloom

and burns on the shore. Then the kiddies dancing sidewise

declared it a treat, and the ice-cream gnomes slurped their last that day.

Inside, in the twilit nest of evening,

something was coming undone. Dimples could feel it,

surging over her shoulder like a wave of energy. And then—

it was gone. No one had witnessed it but herself.

And so Dimples took off for the city, which was near and wholesome.

There, with her sister Larissa, she planned the big blue boat

that future generations will live in, and thank us for. It twitched

at its steely moorings, and seemed to say: Live, like life, with me.

Let the birds wash over them, Laure said, for what use are earmuffs

in a snowstorm, except to call attention to distant tots

who have strayed. And now the big Mother warms them,

accepts them, for the nervous predicates they are. Far from the beach-fiend’s

howling, their adventure nurses itself back

to something like health. On the fifth day it takes a little blancmange

and stands up, only to fall back into a hammock.

I told you it was coming, cried Dimples, but look out,

Another big one is on the way!

And they all ran, and got out, and that was that for that day.

II

Hungeringly, Tidbit approached the crone who held the bowl,

… drank the honey. It had good things about it.

Now, pretty as a moment,

Tidbit’s housecoat sniffed the undecipherable,

the knowable past. They were anxious

to get back to work. Diane was looking relaxed.

Then, some say, Pete said

it was the afternoon backing up again, inexorable

with dreams, looking for garbage to pick a fight with.

“My goodness! Do you suppose his blowhole’s …?”

Sometime later they returned with Pete and the others,

he all excited, certain he had spotted a fuse this time.

Rags the mutt licked and yelped. “Oh, get down!”

But Rags seemed to be on to something. “And if they come

through the alfalfa this time, we’ll have a nice idea

of where they are, of who these men are. If they abrade

the abandoned silo, no one will be wiser. Look, their pastel

tent, and flags made from the same substance, waving dehors—

I’ve got to get an angle on this, a firm tack of some kind.”

Willingly, the flood washed over the day

and so much that was complicated, from the past:

the tiny doggy door Rags had made with a T-square,

surplus sequins.

And if they don’t want to play

according to our rules, what then? “Why, then

we’ll come up with something, like the sink-drain.

Anyway, this is all just an excuse for you to leave your posts,

toying with anagrams, while the real message

is being written in the stars. To go ahead,

it says, but be watchful for scouts

in the corn shocks. This close to Halloween there are lots of little bumps

around, and tea cosies to shroud them. Beware one last time;

but as the spirit of going is to go, I can’t

control you, advise you much longer. Just keep on

persevering, and then we’ll know what we have done matters most to us.”

With that, the sticks uprooted the tent.

A thousand passions came unleashed,

but fortunately for the girls, none of them were around to witness it—

they were off in a cage with the canaries.

Now, though,

when it came time to vote for who the deed was done

by, the others mattered too. It was just their pot luck.

Oh well, Laure offered, we were going to close down that shaftway

any...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Publisher’s Note
• Dedication
• Girls on the Run
• About the Author
• Copyright