John Ashbery's Nest, An Interactive Tour of the Poet's Home
John Ashbery’s Nest is a website and virtual tour of the American poet's home. In 1978, when John Ashbery purchased his first and only house in Hudson, New York, 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.
