Vivian Girls on the Run

While assembling a more final version of forthcoming poetry book, I decided to include several poems I'd written in workshops I've led over the past year or so: poems written while the group read long works by John Ashbery aloud.

So I got to thinking about Ashbery and then I noticed a DVD on my floor: In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger, an amazing documentary by Jessica Yu that Dana and I watched over the holidays, in the glow of Dana's electric menorah.

Ashbery based his exhilirating book-length poem Girls on the Run on the works of Darger, and the FSG edition of the book features a typical Darger painting on the cover. Darger got his images from all sorts of sources, including colouring books, kids' primers, comic strips, newspaper clippings, etc. And he put penises on his little girls. His most famous little girls were the Vivian Girls, about whom he wrote a 15,000-page novel (honestly) over the course of about 60 years.

Somehow the correlation between Ashbery's methods and Darger's methods hadn't clicked for me. Perhaps because I'm so goddamn dense. But Ashbery, too, often constructs his poems grabbing words and lines from other poets and other sources. Now, Ashbery's no outsider like Darger, but there is something similar in the results of what they do: for example, the fact that their works often seem simultaneously very current and from another era.

And as I write this, I think of another doc we've seen recently: The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jeff Feuerzeig's bittersweet celebration of the outsider singer/songwriter. Johnston's garage studio looks a bit like Darger's one-room apartment: absolutely cluttered with evidence of obsessive work. And Johnston's art often borrowed from other pop-culture sources.

Perhaps John Ashbery and Daniel Johnston should collaborate on something.

Required listening: Firehose's version of Johnston's "Walking the Cow," with vocals by Mike Watt.

I was introduced to Watt and Firehose by my dear friend Joe Grengs. Good lord, it's been so long since I've written to Joe. I once wrote a long poem for him: "Say Fway Luh Looz." I have copies of a chapbook version I did of it. If you want one, let me know.

Over and out.