ABOUT JOHN ASHBERY’S CREATED SPACES

The two domestic environments where John Ashbery lived and worked for the longest periods of his life—his Created Spaces (one located in Hudson, NY and one in New York, NY)—offer important insights into his art. These purposefully constructed spaces that housed Ashbery's domestic archive both reflect and are reflected in his writing, which itself is heavily involved with other literature, music, the visual and decorative arts, architecture, theater, and film. Carefully chosen, and developed over many years, Ashbery's Created Spaces nourished and stimulated his creativity; they also continue to provide one of the most personally meaningful of contexts for his work.

These Created Spaces existed as fully dimensional poetic worlds that could be experienced in real time—artworks as visual "poems"—revealing much about the essential qualities of Ashbery's poetry of words. In them, he arranged vocabularies of individual components according to a distinctive syntax of composition, within architectural spaces that determine the overall form of the work. They convey a remarkably coherent view of Ashbery's sensibilities, aesthetics, and creative processes. While these spaces may no longer by physically accessible in their original form, they can currently be virtually explored through the “John Ashbery’s Nest” digital humanities project (see below).

John Ashbery’s Nest

John Ashbery’s Nest is a website and virtual tour of the American poet’s Hudson, NY home created as a collaboration of the Yale Digital Humanities Lab, VRH Solutions, and Yale ITS under the guidance of Karin Roffman.

In 1978, when John Ashbery purchased his first and only house, he began an intensive project of creating his ideal vision of a home. Although not well known as a collector, he had actually begun to study American antiques in childhood, composing some of his earliest poems about objects he found. From the 1950s to the 1980s, he also amassed hundreds of new, small collections while also writing about them (ceramics, wallpaper, etc.) in art reviews, in essays for popular magazines on eclectic collectors and their homes, and in provocative new poems. Painstakingly restored over a fifteen-year period, his house became a frame for these assemblages, providing a place to display his discoveries and continue to learn from them.

While the Hudson House has always been a private space, this project provides, through a website highlighting Ashbery’s creation of each room (including photographs, biographical details, archival records, and audio clips of Ashbery and his partner, David Kermani, discussing each room), both crucial documentation and an experience of how he has used and imagined the home. Links to related poetic texts demonstrate how deeply objects and houses have resonated in Ashbery’s artistic life.

Using new virtual reality technologies to explore rooms and interact with objects inside the house, this project—which began with a prototype view of the Center Hall and continues to expand further into the house—enables users to experience the intimacy of being in “the middle of things,” a reality that echoes in Ashbery’s greatest poems.

Each room includes 360-degree photography, panoramas, and still photography. A viewer may:

• move through each room and view objects closely

• listen to audio of John Ashbery and David Kermani discussing the provenance of objects

• read additional archival information on objects and rooms

• explore links to related Ashbery’s poems to highlight the relationship between physical objects and poetic imagination.

Future plans include expanding the project to include virtual reality touring of Ashbery’s created space in New York City.

ARTICLES & RESOURCES

In Context: "Created Spaces" as a New Resource in Ashbery Studies

“A Dream of This Room”—Rain Taxi Portfolio of Essays on John Ashbery’s
Textual and Domestic Environments

Compendium of Additional Resources on Ashbery’s Created Spaces

Miscellany of Related Created Spaces Projects