AH!MERICA

Thrilled to be able to announce a new (posthumous) Allen Ginsberg title.

The publishers, the wonderfully adventurous isolarri Books  present:

“Allen Ginsberg’s Naropa lectures edited into a guide for not losing your mind, or attention, in contemporary America.”

AH!MERICA

“In 1974, Allen Ginsberg co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics  at the Naropa Institute. For the next two decades, until his death, he taught there, delivering legendary, rambling, and incisive lectures on the life and work of William Blake. Now, for the first time, these lectures have been edited from the original audio archives into a single volume.”

“Taking its title from Blake’s “Ah! Sunflower”,  AH!MERICA develops a poetics of attention: the line as breath, the “somatic rhythm” a poem can transmit, and the force of “minute particulars.” Look hard at what everyone else has trained themselves not to notice. Cornices on nineteenth-century apartment buildings, rivet-heads on subway pillars, the “fat black fungus” of chewing gum on a platform: the overlooked textures of daily life become the raw material of American writing, and a way to test perception against habit.

Beyond the physical world, AH!MERICA reads Blake as a contemporary psychology of public feeling. Ginsberg identifies the eternal battles playing out in the public square and within the self: wrath versus pity, anger versus mercy, revolutionary fervor versus disillusionment.

Amid the commercial noise and political cynicism of today, Ginsberg suggests that Blake registers in our decade just as profoundly as he did in his own. There is no easy relief from these tensions, only the multivalence of poetry. Yet, ultimately, two lessons rise above the rest in this collection: generosity can outlast despair, and a life lived alertly—open to suffering as much as to beauty—remains possible.”

Across his work – sprawling, prophetic, comic, tender – one quality remains central – honesty. “You don’t have to be right,” he once said. “All you have to do is be candid.”

The editors, notably Sebastian Clark, additionally note (addressing the methodology behind this particularly deft collection):

“We began with a detailed line edit of the collected lectures to ensure coherence, focusing on making Ginsberg’s speech accessible without losing its distinction, spontaneity, or sincerity. Once the text was refined at the sentence level, we shifted to collating the lectures and arranging them thematically.  The organizing principle became Ginsberg’s sustained engagement with Blake, particularly the concept of “double vision”- the ability to see, simultaneously, the material world and its deeper, spiritual, dimensions. (but) we also sought to foreground Ginsberg’s ongoing dialogue with some of Ginsberg’s slightly more contemporary literary forebears – his “gurus” – specifically, William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, and Charles Reznikoff.  Siphoned partially through these figures, Ginsberg’s notion of heightened perception, of truly seeing, serves as the collection’s binding filament. His insistence on attentiveness – to breathing, to people, to the world – shaped not just the content of the lectures but also the form the collection ultimately took.”

Visit the isolarii website to order and read more.