‘All These Unimportant Details’: John Ashbery at home

Abstract

John Ashbery is a domestic poet. He recognizes that the home contains and organizes a plurality of objects, but also a plurality of thoughts, experiences, and social roles. The domesticity of Ashbery’s poetry materializes many of the contradictory abstractions of modern life, and gives them a place, even if their relationship with each other remains obscure. His poetic homes are microcosms of America, macrocosms of the mind, and material languages. The suburban home is defined in opposition to everything chaotic, decentred, and unstable: rapidly advancing technology, the cyclical renewals of nature, a carnivorous economy, the expanse of air and sky. Paradoxically, the home depends on these opposing forces, even incorporating them into itself, because for Ashbery the domestic is the conscious frame within which things are understood. His image for this kind of domestic perception is the houseboat: homely, comfortable, anchored between nature and civilization, and always in flux.