To continue our month-long celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Naropa University, we bring you a special gem from the Naropa Collection (every recorded teaching, seminar, and event that founder Chögyam Trungpa taught at the university): a video recording of a 1975 poetry reading with Trungpa Rinpoche, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Waldman to an audience of over 800 people. During the reading, Chögyam Trungpa introduces each of his poems, and we are given a rare glimpse of his inspiration and life at the time of writing. Also noteworthy is Ginsberg’s reading of his legendary poem “Howl”, which is considered to be one of his best performances of the piece.
Learn more and watch the reading
Introducing this historic reading is a feature article that also explores the origins of the Naropa’s founding creative writing department, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics:
“As Naropa Institute’s founder, Trungpa Rinpoche’s aspiration for the poetics department was a sort of creative and spiritual cross-training: making Buddhists better communicators and teachers through the study of poetry, and uplifting poets to be more beneficial to others through the practice of meditation.”