Girls on the Run is a long poem by the American writer John Ashbery, published in its own volume in 1999.

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.

[1] David Kirby of The New York Times 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 and T. S. Eliot 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.

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.