John Ashbery’s two domestic environments where he has lived and worked for the longest periods of his life, his Created Spaces, offer many important insights into his art. These purposefully constructed spaces that house 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 nourish and stimulate his creativity; they also provide the most personally meaningful of contexts for his work.

These Created Spaces are fully-dimensional poetic worlds that can be experienced in real time, artworks that are visual “poems,” revealing much about the essential qualities of Ashbery’s poetry of words. In them, vocabularies of individual components are arranged 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.

ARC hopes to encourage greater understanding and exploration of the Created Spaces concept by making information about these extraordinary resources available via this website. Please use the menu buttons above to learn more about different aspects of this broad and complex subject.

Note: Certain sections of this website are currently under construction, but they have been included in their prelimary forms in order to coincide with the publication of A Dream of This Room: A Created Spaces Portfolio of Works on John Ashbery's Textual and Domestic Environments in the periodical Rain Taxi (see link in menu above).