Girls on the Run. - Review - book review

Art in America, Feb, 2000 by Raphael Rubinstein

Girls on the Run, by John Ashbery, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999; 55 pages, $20.

"Most people," John Ashbery once observed in an exhibition review, "first experience art in the form of a comic strip or illustrated children's book, and the heat of that first encounter, like that of first love, is never entirely equaled afterward." It seems likely that Ashbery was speaking from personal experience, given the recurrence in his poetry of elements from such sources. His early experimental poem "Europe" appropriated phrases from a WWI-era children's book titled Beryl of the Bi-plane. Another of his most influential poems, the sestina "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape," is a zany pastoral inhabited by characters from Popeye cartoons.

Of course, it is hardly accurate to characterize Ashbery, whose poems engage such adult subjects as love and loss, the complexities of urban life and the nature of art, as a poet of childish things. Yet, in his most recent volume of poetry, Girls on the Run, the reader is plunged into a realm more beholden to children's literature than ever before. Here's a stanza from the second of the poem's 22 numbered sections.

   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 the
   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 dog door Rags had made with a
   T-square, surplus sequins.

Within the first three pages, we encounter not only Pete and Rags, but also Dimples, Larissa, Judy, Laure and Tidbit. As the poem progresses, these and other characters with storybook names engage in behavior appropriate to a children's tale as well as in much-harder-to-classify activities and thoughts. Throughout the book, action and style are in constant flux: personages appear and vanish within the space of a few lines; humorous pastiches of old-fashioned children's books modulate, almost imperceptibly, into abstract poetry; surrealistic imagery is interrupted by old-timey song lyrics; a stray diary entry written as prose inexplicably switches to verse in its last lines. This literary channel surfing would be thoroughly maddening were it not for the fact that Ashbery lulls the reader into a free-floating state in which nonstop metamorphosis is accepted as a matter of course. In Girls on the Run, Ashbery may have achieved his closest approximation yet to the weird logic of dreams.

These strange reveries were inspired by an equally unusual set of art works: the paintings of the Chicago visionary Henry Darger (1892-1973). A recluse whose work only came to light posthumously, Darger devoted most of his life to composing a bizarre 15,145-page prose epic, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, and its 300 or so accompanying illustrations [see A.i.A., Jan. '98]. In settings that range from bucolic landscapes to vast battle scenes, Darger's tale and paintings follow the adventures of seven young princesses (the Vivian Girls) of a fictional kingdom. In his crowded, friezelike watercolors--which make extensive use of a collage-based technique that takes images from comic strips, newspaper ads' and the like--the princesses are surrounded by legions of other little girls of equal picturebook sweetness. But Darger, who was apparently haunted by the loss of his mother and sister (the former died after giving birth to a baby girl who was immediately surrendered for adoption), often depicts his Shirley Temple-like characters naked and sporting male genitalia, and while they are frequently shown frolicking, other pictures show them enduring torture and strangulation. Increasingly recognized as a major contribution to 20th-century American art, Darger's sprawling creation is also the inadvertent portrait of a deeply troubled individual. The work's power may derive, in part, from the conjunction of innocent celebration and unhealthy obsession.

Darger fans who come to Ashbery's poem expecting a verbal re-creation of the Vivian sisters' adventures will be disappointed. Unlike most art-inspired poets, Ashbery treats Darger's paintings not as prepackaged subjects but as points of departure for his own wild imagination--an italicized phrase at the beginning of the poem describes Girls on the Run as being "after Henry Darger." All the same, one doesn't have to look very hard to find parallels between poem and pictures. For instance, Ashbery clearly has in mind the flowers thronging Darger's compositions when he writes lines such as: