Customer Reviews

Girls on the Run: A Poem

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4 star:		(1)
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I must say that I haven't always been a believer in Ashbery's aesthetic -- or rather his lack of much else beyond his aesthetic -- but this book is absolutely brilliant, especially for anyone who has a passing familiarity with Henry Darger's singularly bizarre and oddly moving work. What a brilliant move to incorporate Darger into a book-length poem. This book marks the first time I felt I moved fully into Ashbery's work, and those that may have felt intimidated or put-off by him before should read this book first if they're interested in taking another look at him. Now I'm a believer.

This is the very favorite book that I read. It has an author by John Ashbery. It is real poetry. I wanted to read it 2x before I read it. It is good for the beach reading (date: June 18). Please bring a dictionary to look up the different words. Who are the girls (names)? I took this book to everywhere I was going one day and finished that book in 3 days after going 19 places. Please read this enjoyable imagination.

I, too, have always admired but never been bowled over by John Ashberry's work. With this work I am convinced he is our greatest American poet. Since I am familiar with Henry Darger's pictures and style, Ashberry's imagery seems natural even as it is surreal. The two share an aesthetic of using common cultural artifacts and twisting them so that even though you're staring right at them, you no longer recognize what you're seeing. It is a dream language, and Ashberry has never been so adept at navigating that territory. The poetry, like Darger's paintings, mix the pastoral and the apocalyptic, the innocent and the decadent with such unsettling virtuostic ease that you're not sure which is which. If I had to pick a poetry to compare it to, I might pick Blake--both for the lyric sweetness and hinted threats of "Innocence and Experience," and the cultural commentary/prophecy of his later, longer work. If, like me, your experience with Ashberry's work has left you shrugging, this os the place to start. I don't read much poetry anymore--this will reaffirm your faith in it.

Predictable surprises -- and a few unpredictable ones -- inhabit this volume, a single long poem loosely based on the illustrations of Henry Darger. There are chuckleworthy phrases that rattle about the brain with a happy insouciance for several days after one has read the thing. "The oxymoron gets his rocks off" and "pink shrouds fell on the pansy jamboree." And we like going for the ride, even if we get a little dizzy and a little seasick. The "androgynous truths" bubble perkily to the surface, in a verbal universe where what matters matters as much as what doesn't matter. We know a few of the magician's tricks, but there are always a few swerves and slides which we can't anticipate. The honey drips from a blighted bough -- or is it a bright and sprightly bough? -- and the housepets lap the gruel in their gaily-coloured bowls, and the narrator stands back and lets it all happen. As with anything by Ashbery, there are unwholesome things and things from which the reader runs away, but we marvel at the ingenuity nonetheless.

Words very good, yes. Ashbery writes best good book. Yes, buy it, good, yes.

I picked this up on impulse. I'm interested in the work of Henry J. Darger. But I was not taken by this book at all. Ashbery flows a lot of beautiful verbiage together. But it's incomprehensible at a first reading and I'm not going to spend more time trying to root anything out of it. It seems like a lot of surrealist automatic writing. There were occasional images that would surface in an appealing way like, "count the dogs as furniture as otherwise there will be no chairs," but few of the images recurred enough to give any sense of narrative or unifying theme. I bet Darger's naive literature is a lot more fascinating than this.