Naropa and the Beats: Allen Ginsberg Opens a Poetry School

In the summer of nineteen seventy-four, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher named Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche opened the Naropa Institute in Boulder, the first Buddhist-inspired university in the Western world. He had brought a remarkable group of people with him, or drawn them to him, including the poet Allen Ginsberg and the poet Anne Waldman. Together, Ginsberg and Waldman founded a poetics program within Naropa that they named the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

The name was a statement. Kerouac had been dead five years. The Beats, Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and their circle, were the literary generation that had broken from academic formalism in the nineteen fifties, writing in a voice that moved fast, used jazz rhythm, and reported experience without flinching. At Naropa, their project was to build an institution that would preserve and extend that tradition while connecting it to contemplative practice.

The first Summer Writing Program in nineteen seventy-four drew more than thirteen hundred students to Boulder. Writers who came through Naropa in those years included Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, Diane di Prima, Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, and John Cage. For a period in the late nineteen seventies, Boulder felt, to certain literary observers, like a city where something was actively being invented.

Naropa has been regionally accredited since nineteen eighty-eight and awards graduate degrees. Ginsberg taught here until shortly before his death in nineteen ninety-seven. The Jack Kerouac School still holds a Summer Writing Program each year, and it still carries the argument that poetry is a practice and attention is its discipline.