Allen Ginsberg Moved to Boulder and Stayed

In nineteen seventy-four, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher named Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche founded a college in Boulder with the poet Allen Ginsberg as a collaborator. They called the poetry program the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. It was a name that could only have been chosen in Boulder, in nineteen seventy-four.

Naropa, as the institution came to be known, drew the remaining active members of the Beat Generation as faculty. William S. Burroughs taught there. Gregory Corso taught there. Anne Waldman, who co-founded the poetry school with Ginsberg, brought a generation of younger experimental poets through its halls. The school institutionalized an avant-garde that most American universities of the era would not have admitted as a visiting speaker.

Boulder in nineteen seventy-four was an exceptionally particular place. The University of Colorado had been a genuine counterculture center in the late nineteen sixties. The town had enough radical infrastructure, cooperative food stores, experimental newspapers, alternative medicine practitioners, that an institution like Naropa could find its audience. The housing was cheap enough that people who lived on fellowships and poetry sales could afford it.

The school still operates. Naropa University remains one of the few accredited Buddhist-inspired universities in the United States. It grants degrees in contemplative education, religious studies, and the arts.

What the school could not prevent was the transformation of the broader city around it. The policies that preserved Boulder's mountain landscape also preserved its housing scarcity. By the nineteen nineties, the rents that had allowed Ginsberg and his circle to live here had roughly tripled in real terms. The counterculture that had given Boulder its identity was being priced to the edges, slowly, by the very conservation success the city celebrated.

The school remained. The bohemian Boulder that made it possible did not, quite.