Beats at Naropa: an anthology

This book, as indicated, is an anthology of writing by the beat poets of the 1960s and 1970s who attended and were involved at Colorado's Buddhist university, Naropa. It traces the historical involvement of the writers and university, and compares their work among one another, in the context of the setting of Naropa. What was then the Naropa Institute, now features a school within itself named "The Jack Kerouac Institute of Disembodied Poets", as a tribute to his involvement at the University. The book mentions other institutions, such as the Zen Center in San Francisco, but focuses on Naropa as the central institute of learning and creating among the culturally valuable beat poets of the US.

              "Allen also went on to describe the subtler definitions of the term, including beatitude, beatific, the hipster perspective of everything being exhausted, which had also Buddhist connotation,  the framing of the historical period, and then the broader view of resonance and association of a range of people, including editors, filmmakers, musicians, and several generations of writers, activists, thinkers, and what we call at Naropa, the "outrider" tradition." (14)

This passage of the introduction gives the reader an initial glimpse at the original student body of Naropa, and its cultural relevance at the time that it was started. Allen Ginsberg's description is in reference to the "beat" culture and what it represented, something which was key in the development of the Naropa curriculum and its educational importance. 

              Allen and I declared in our “mission statement” on the founding of The Kerouac School in 1974: Though” not all the poetry teachers are Buddhist, nor is it required of the teachers and students in this secular school to follow any specific meditative path, it is the happy accident of this century’s poetic history- especially since Gertrude Stein- that the quality of mind and mindfulness probed by Buddhist practice is similar to the probes and practices of poetry. There being no party line but mindfulness of thought and language itself, no conflict need arise between religion and poetry, and the marriage of two disciplines at Naropa is expected to flourish during the next hundred years.”(165)

This quotation supplements the previous one in terms of cultural relevance, and speculation towards future relevance. By examining the intentions for the Kerouac school and its Buddhist involvement, the entire mission statement of Naropa can be analyzed. Is it more effective? For poetry it is, but what about for other disciplines? 

                   In 1948, in an auditory hallucination of William Blake, Ginsberg had experienced the voice of the poet as a time machine. But we don’t have to hallucinate to get on the time machine. There’s this window of time that opened here at Naropa, and was captured in the archive. We’re only three decades old as an institution, but our archive holds the voices of people who were borth at the start of the last century, and it has their students and their students’ students, and twenty five minutes from now, it has you. And it will have your students too, if we get it right. This is our community of memory.(215)

The description of Naropa as a "community of memory" is what separates it from other schools and universitys. Its rich history coupled with its unique religious and integrative curriculum sets it apart from other educational institutions and something more substantial and truly educational, not just for the mind and for the professions, but for the development of the spiritual, cultural, and mental self as well.