A Study of John Ashbery as a Poet and Collector in his Hudson Home

FAIN: FT-57183-09

Karin Sabrina Roffman
United States Military Academy (West Point, NY 10996)

When American poet John Ashbery (1927-) purchased a home in Hudson, New York in 1979 in the middle of his career, he embarked on thirty very prolific years of work not only as a poet, but also as a collector. I seek NEH funding to explore how Ashbery has used his work as a collector to inform and shape his work as a writer. I plan to spend about two weeks of the summer interviewing John Ashbery on the provenance of the objects in his home, and then I plan to spend six weeks completing an essay on John Ashbery's use of his collections and his ideas about collecting in his poetry. On completion, both of these pieces (interview and essay) will be made available to students and scholars on the Ashbery Resource Center website, an educational site created by the Flow Chart Foundation in conjunction with Bard College.