Literary critic Harold Bloom famously labeled post-1950s literature “the Age of Ashbery,” a statement about the stature of American poet, art critic, and collagist John Ashbery (1927-2017). Through a detailed website and virtual tour of the Victorian home in Hudson, NY, that Ashbery bought in 1978 as a place to display objects he had been collecting since childhood, John Ashbery’s Nest offers a wider and deeper angle through which to consider this artist’s work in the twenty-first century. The relationship between Ashbery’s poetic practice, his collage work, and his long career as an art critic is a subject of growing interest to scholars in part through the work of Nest, which reveals through its interlinked visual, textual, and audio evidence how Ashbery’s serious study of objects is, in fact, also everywhere evident in his poems and collages.

This project, the only one of its kind about Ashbery’s former private home, not only seeks to demonstrate crucial connections between the things themselves and Ashbery’s imaginative use of them in poetry and collage, but also seeks to demonstrate a methodology for exploring the relationship between objects and literature in general, an increasingly important field in literary, material culture, and museum studies.