AH!MERICA
ISBN-13: 9798987123171
Contributor(s): Allen Ginsberg
Subjects: Literary Theory
Publisher: Isolarii
Publisher Imprint: Isolarii
Publication Date: 25-06-2026
Format: Paperback
Availability: Out of stock
£15.95
About the book
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, 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 fervour 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: generosity can outlast despair, and a life lived alertly-open to suffering as much as to beauty-remains possible.