Seminar: ASHLAB
Offered through the MFA Writing Program
Spring 2013
Thursdays 8:00 – 10:30pm
Note: Media Studies students can sign up for the course as an independent study. Contact Instructor / Writing Program Director Robert Polito at politor@newschool.edu
Instructors: Irwin Chen, Adam Fitzgerald, Tom Healy, and Robert Polito
For poets, prose writers, and anyone interested in the “Digital Humanities.”
This semester’s seminar is part of an ongoing sequence of classes that involves a digital mapping of John Ashbery’s Hudson, NY house via his work – and the reverse: a digital mapping of his work via that Hudson house. Students work on various projects – annotating objects in the house, such as paintings, curios, architecture, and mementos; anthologizing and annotating poems according to various subjects and themes, such as music or childhood; and defining and mapping routes through both the house and the work, Ashbery’s poetry as well as his prose. The class is inherently multidisciplinary and is team-taught by poets, critics, and digital designers. How is it possible, this course asks, to archive and map the interiors of (arguably) America’s most important and influential living poet, John Ashbery? His house in Hudson, NY has been both his residence and studio for over thirty years. In that time, Ashbery and his partner, David Kermani, have acquired significant collections of art, books, furniture, and other unique objects. ASHLAB is an ongoing project that plans to document these collections and to use new technology and design to re-imagine the traditional writer’s archive in virtual space. In doing so, the course will introduce students to Ashbery’s literary/artistic contents through archival examination of certain specific rooms and areas, and address the larger questions of the arts and archives, as we study his poetry and prose.
Irwin Chen got his BA in English Literature from Yale University in 1994, and spent one year in the Netherlands on a Fulbright studying design at the Jan van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht. He is the founder of Redub LLC, an information design and interaction design consultancy based in New York City. He currently teaches at Parsons School of Design and is working with students in the ASHLAB seminar at The New School to build online platforms for their research
Adam Fitzgerald edits Maggy and is founding editor for Monk Books. His poems, interviews and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Fortnight Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Post Road, Rain Taxi, The Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and in the ASHLAB seminar at The New School
Tom Healy teaches in the Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy and in the ASHLAB seminar. His book of poems, What the Right Hand Knows, was a finalist for the 2009 L.A. Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. In 2011, Healy was named chairman of the Fulbright Scholarship Board by President Obama. A veteran on the New York art scene, Healy received the New York City Arts Award from Mayor Bloomberg for his work to rebuild the downtown arts community after 9/11. He studied at Harvard and Columbia.
Robert Polito’s most recent books are the poetry collection Hollywood & God and Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber. Hollywood & God was chosen by Barnes and Noble as one of the top five poetry books of the year; and Jonathan Lethem in The New Yorker selected Farber on Film as his favorite book that year. Polito received a National Book Critics Circle Award for Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. He is the author of an earlier poetry collection Doubles, as well as of A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover; and the editor of numerous books, including the Library of America volumes Crime Novels: American Noir Novels of the 1930’s and 40’s Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950’s. His reviews, criticism, and essays on literature, film, visual art, and popular music have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Harpers, The Believer, Bookforum, The Poetry Foundation website, Artforum, BookForum, the New York Times Book Review, Best American Essays and Best American Film Writing. The founder and Director of the Graduate Writing Program, he is a Professor of Writing at the New School, and currently is completing Detours: Seven Noir Lives.