Regarding the founding of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (JKS), what were the seeds of the idea, how did they germinate?
There was for me with the idea of creating a poetics school the idea of performance, memorization, song, all the oral traditions—the sounding of the text. And also in spiritual traditions—you hear it first, it’s delivered orally by the teacher. So you’re get t ing empowered through the transmission. Your mind is working with it. “What can I hold on to?” “Are you following it closely?” “Is it your body receiving it?” And then you read it, study it, and then you get to practice it, and you have it for a lifetime. In your psyche. And there are the written texts. All those sacred books of poetry. You might also memorize.
That struck me at the time, and that goes into questions about intentionality and pedagogy, what was different at Naropa.
There was also the example of Black Mountain College, their notion of collaboration, myriad artists who are working together, growing their own food. What an extraordinary time, people coming from the Bauhaus movement who escaped the Nazis to teach on US soil, in rural North Carolina and young artist geniuses such as John Cage. The idea of becoming artists together in this intimate space in recuperative time is powerful. And it bonds you with people for a lifetime. I still feel that with all the people I worked with from the beginning at JKS. And Boulder was an interesting haven, reminding some of the Himalayas.
In 1974, I was invited along with Allen Ginsberg (Ginsberg surely a prime motivator) and Diane di Prima for the first summer program of the Naropa Institute. Ginsberg and I and di Prima already had some contact with Rinpoche. In my case and Ginsberg’s, in New York City. Chögyam Trungpa spoke at the Poetry Project at St. Marks I was directing, and I had been to Tail of the Tiger in Vermont—now known as Karmê Chöling—in 1970. He said to stick with the holy city (NYC). Allen also knew Trungpa, so it seemed that we were being invited to be involved specifically to consider and start a program with poets/poetry. The arts were important to Rinpoche, as we know. Everything was open to feedback. AND he was very keen on the notion of dharma arts.
I’d spent time during several summers at Allen Ginsberg’s farm in Cherry Valley, New York, approximately four hours from the city. Many friends, poets, artists, distinguished guests, Zen teachers, and others would pass through. The summer of 1974 poet Bernadette Mayer and some other friends joined me at the farm—she and I had just completed a reading/performance in Art Park near Niagara Falls—which started me thinking how best to take some of the poetic energy out of New York and generate an alternative place where poets could gather. It was at this precise moment that the invitation had arrived to visit Naropa, the newly gathering experimental Buddhist school on the spine of the Rocky Mountain continent, an auspicious journey which altered the direction of my life.
What was Chögyam Trungpa’s role in the creation and nurturing of JKS?
Well, he had great intuition of course. And I think there was that sense of a new way of seeing community, and once you have a taste of that… You’ve had a genuine teacher who’s actually in the action himself, with a brilliant mind, perception, getting on the bead with things… the humor, the subtlety, I mean, I’m so drawn to that. You’re seeing through the various layers and levels with perception, this is a perception that brilliance can have. Those kinds of moments. And he wanted the meditators to teach poets meditation and the poets to teach meditators poetry.
In a meeting that involved Allen Ginsberg, myself, John Cage, the poet Jackson Mac Low, Gregory Bateson, and a few other people, Armand Schwerner, George Quasha—poets in the experimental tradition who were scholarly seekers as well. Jackson had practiced Buddhism. They were very magnetized by Trungpa’s style and perception and the books coming out—Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973). And when Trungpa first came to this country, he asked to see the poets. Whoever comes to a country and wants to meet the poets? Not, “I want to meet the President,” but “Take me to your poets!”
But there was also a sort of hands-off approach, I mean the fact that I could be trusted—I didn’t have teaching experience in the academic sense. I had already published books, had a small press and widely traveled poetry routes and was the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and that was almost handed to me right out of college because I had tremendous energy and a vision of community. The Poetry Project, which received a two-year grant from Lyndon Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity, was intergenerational. That was also important to me. That it was a community not just of kids all the same age and experience.
'Disembodied' was the wild card, a flash-in-the-pan inspired adjective that stuck. It suggested that although not all the poets were alive and present in their bodies, their work was still active and hovering on the tongues of young contemporaries, and we were still feeding on these elders with a sense of continuing the lineage.
So in that meeting in 1974 was when we asked John Cage what was the secret of Black Mountain College. He said, “Well, it all happened at lunch.” So there was right away the idea of it being communal. And in the Dharma scene, you have feasts, and it is very important to be on common ground in sangha. From the very start, I started invoking this notion of sangha with the poets. And I was interested in diversity that can take a long time, and engaging people beyond the binary, and more women.
Then Trungpa—Ginsberg and I were sitting closely to him on one end of the conference table—said “It’s a hundred-year project, at least.” And I mean, Ginsberg and I talked about it. We were up all night. It’s like shaktipat (“transmission”). A sharp hit to the heart-mind. Who is talking about a hundred-year project right now? In 1974?
After deliberations and fantastical imaginings, we named it the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Why such an exotic moniker? Kerouac, not only an experimental prose writer, of great depth and complexity, he was one of the finest spontaneous “be-bop” poets. He had also realized the First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering, and had glimpsed satori and read intensely in Dharma matters and literatures. (Witness his massive text: Some of the Dharma). “Disembodied” was the wild card, a flash-in-the-pan inspired adjective that stuck. It suggested that although not all the poets were alive and present in their bodies, their work was still active and hovering on the tongues of young contemporaries, and we were still feeding on these elders with a sense of continuing the lineage. Around Buddhism you hear a lot of talk of “lineage.” And in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition you hear a lot about “crazy wisdom” and “whispered oral transmission.” These concepts certainly didn’t sound alien to the poets’ ears.
Trungpa, himself an artist and poet, had from the outset given his sanction and provided generous accommodation for us to teach writing and poetics under the auspices of a contemplative school. A college founded on the principles of non-competitiveness and nonaggression was welcome ground for both seasoned poets and aspiring ones, a group consistently marginalized in society, who needed a haven for work and study. We dubbed our particular poetry-teaching lineage “Outriders,” in that we were not interested in being “academic” poets—vying for tenure—but wanted to “honor poetry itself” by having it taught by practicing writers whose primary preoccupation was poeticizing rather than official teaching, and to continue a tradition of a national convocation of poets working with open and experimental forms.
So there was this creative scene in New York, the work you were doing at St. Marks Poetry Project, and a lot of these principals came with you. And so when you were flung into this role at JKS, and co-founding of the Kerouac School, these were all themes that were alive for you?
I was ready to take charge. I thought I’d been given some kind of holy assignment. I’m sorry, I get carried away. So yes, I was ready, and I’d had all this experience so far training in what I called infrastructure poetics, and had worked with many challenges and difficult characters. We were coming out of the Vietnam War, a lot of drug meltdown and things were becoming nightmarish, and some things were getting straighter again, more oppression, incarceration, all still with us.
And getting closer to Allen Ginsberg, who felt these things as well about this crucial time we were in who had already had visions of William Blake, and was also very open around who he was, his sexuality, and the counterculture things that he stood for, and then the sense of community, always working on these underground projects to keep the world safer for poetry. Ginsberg and Diane di Prima were also drawn to Rinpoche and this vision of care, and seeing that this would be the circle. And Joanne Kyger was also a key teacher in summer who I felt was also a founding mother.
And then the other thing with our founder, Trungpa, was practice, practice, practice! I mean, setting up a school where the people teaching had to be practitioners, had to practice—that was unusual. The writing students often drifted into the Dharma, but it was not something that was pushed. I always admired the Dharma being “self-secret.” the whole possibility was auspicious. It was up to you.
Maybe you could share a little bit about some of the key players. I know there’s a dichotomy between people who were teachers, faculty members who had to be in meetings, teach classes, and the Summer Writing Program, which had its own life and history, and all the people who came through. Who comes to mind as essential people whose presence really shaped the school?
Amiri Baraka, who was very controversial during his lifetime—for invoking Vodun dieties and singing praise of Mao—was a key figure during summers. During his so-called “Beat period,” LeRoi (later Amiri) was married to the Beat poet Hettie Jones and was also editing the Floating Bear lit magazine with Diane di Prima, and was close to Allen and other poets and people in the jazz scene as well. He said much later to me, when we were working on the archive, “Don’t let any of this get buried!” He talked about “What side are you on for the people?” It was very visionary, compelling, generative in terms of social action. He was working in community, he’d been in the Army and then he was in the Village. And then when Malcolm X was murdered, he famously went to Harlem. Then he became even more of a cultural-activist—considered the father of the Black Arts Movement—that same year. He was also quixotic in that he would go through phases and then examine it and not just move on, but then there’d be another accretion. So there was the sense of somebody with real experience. His memorial in Newark was extraordinary. His family had given so much to the community as teachers, leaders—they were activist royalty. He was adored by his old women friends at the Jewish deli in Newark I recall. They’d make a great fuss about him. His son Ras Baraka became Mayor of Newark in 2014. Amiri was also extremely committed to students. Giving them an alternative vision of poetry being a skillful means for change and providing less harm.
We’re committed to documentary/investigatory poetics as activist practices, as openings into narratives and records of erased histories; committed to the archive as a collective repository and resource for culture work.
And this is part of why it’s so important to highlight these contributors to Naropa’s history, because I’ve heard this about Allen Ginsberg as well—the way he cared for students.
There’s also a teacher who comes now regularly, Tongo Eisen-Martin from San Francisco, who’s worked a lot in prisons. He was recently poet laureate of San Francisco. And he loves coming to Naropa, and he does the same thing as Ginsberg. He listens to every student he has. When somebody reads, there’ll be somebody in the class who’s 79 years old, an elderly woman fumbling with her poem, but he listens so closely. Giving the space, showing genuine interest.
In trying to think of other connective tissue—Helen Adam taught us about the Scottish ballad tradition through her dark contemporary “Fearless Junkie Song.” Robert Duncan would talk about the warp and woof as the fabric of language. William Burroughs was very important to me, cool and precise as a scientist, with his “assignments of attention“ as I called them. Take a walk around town and follow the color red he would say. And there was something always curious about Burroughs—his knowledge of the occult, his sense of telepathy, his dream work. His experiences. He would talk about pages in his writing that came out of dream. He would see text in his dreams. That was another thing—the underground, the “feelaheen,” the Interzone, the other sides of America, the left-hand path, the “bend sinister” of magic. Things are not what they seem. And those kinds of students were magnetized to his style of thinking. And the cut-up practice that could be cinematic.
And we had John Ashbery here. The lineages of the program really came from the experimental wing of the New American Poetry. You had Black Mountain, you had New York School, you had the San Francisco Renaissance, and then later Language Poetry, but not the usual canon. And that canon has become more accepted now. The experimental wings of New American Poetry along with Black Arts came fully into its own.
People don’t understand that often about Naropa. They assume we must have an English department, because how could we have a creative writing program without one? That’s one of the first things to mention. This was started because people arrived who were real writers. Also: Do not take critique from someone who has not themselves written a notable work of art. We had that slogan advice from Pound.
Many students came away from JKS with the knowledge base to create and/or revive poetry communities across the world with reading series, small press zine editing & publishing know-how, interviewing skills. Students became faculty at universities & colleges, secondary & elementary schools, special ed K–12, likely teaching poetry. Poets like MFA grad Rachel Levitsky who founded the Belladonna feminist avant-garde collective. Jim Cohn, who has been a chronicler of so much of this time, who has written some truly epic poetry in the Beat spirit. Lisa Birman, a novelist, who worked years with the Summer Writing Program figuring out logistics as its managing director. Brenda Coultas who had worked the carny life in Indiana and been a park officer. Michele Naka Pierce who has been a chair of the MFA program. Laird Hunt, who’s a wonderful novelist, author of Neverhome. Recently, there was a huge conference in France on his work. Eleni Sikelianos, now teaches at Brown and had a recent play transformed from a memoir performed in Greece. So we had very interesting, eclectic students who also were interested in documentary poetics, translation, travel—getting out of the system.
I see all of these esoteric lineages, these lineages of literature and poetry that you’re describing, and the experiment of bringing practice together with deep academic study as flirting with potentials that may actually exist in a more fulsome way in the future. Maybe there’s a way in which we can’t yet fully register the full scope of the initial vision that’s behind Naropa at this point in time. Do you have thoughts on that or anything related to Naropa’s archive, which you explore in your book-long poem, Gossamurmur (2013), now that we’re at 50 years of this 100-year project?
Indeed, we have another 50 to go. It’s hard to let go of the vision of this dream. It just keeps churning. And it still has this efficacy. Gossamurmur is my archive book, my Naropa archive book. And my solution is to take it to the tundra… I loved that as an outlandish idea. I am now working with the Granary Books Archivists—Steve Clay, M.C. Kinneburgh and Conley Lowrance—to find a safe institutional and generative home for the JKS Archive. Naropa University will always have digital copies too. We have had help so far from Emory University and a friend at Harvard Reading Room in this endeavor.
We’re committed to documentary/investigatory poetics as activist practices, as openings into narratives and records of erased histories; commit ted to the archive as a collective repository and resource for culture work. However, we also want to think beyond the archive as mere document, artifact, evidentiary body, and call to mind—to summon from the living body—what Diana Taylor calls “the repertoire,” that wider set of embodied practices, rites, ceremonies, forms of sociality, resistance, and performance which imply continuation, survival, and community through their very transmission as communal memory and ground of being.
In coming to Naropa, I loved the idea of a 100-year project, at least. That was so reassuring. And the sense of ‘tan’ [Sanskrit root of the word ‘tantra’] meaning “thread,” this thread, it’s a golden thread, a silver golden thread, a magic thread, and this continuum and feeling part of continuum. You come in. In a way, the truth had the quality of “come as you are.”
So what you’re saying is that as a poet, there was so much happening here in the landscape and also this vision of being a part of this deeper thread to really give yourself to this particular project?
At Naropa, you were both teachers and writers and you were friends, and you might be with a person at these really life-threatening moments, key moments in their lives. It just felt more intimate and more dharmic in a way to be witnessing and drawing strength through community, through this non-competitive world. Allen Ginsberg always wanted to help people. It was about life, the big life, not just being in some place for a couple of years and that’s it. But the continuum. It’s related to the notion of standing by your word.
The Vision, The Pedagogy, The Art of Social Memory
for the poet mendicants of Naropa
“Tattered Bodhisattvas” beloved Finnish Anselm Hollo called us,
wandering in no void but making the space hold for consciousness
Of language, of poetry, the “dangerous toy.”
We teach imagination as other place
Potential of everyone everywhere living, a larger family? ……. (Robert Duncan)
Wordlight, quantum leap, images in the flames, fossils of vanishing
Are we here to disappear? I once asked Diane di Prima … “We wish.”
And Joanne Kyger—“Translucent like last night’s dream.”
Allen: “And while I’m here I’ll do the work—
And what’s the work?
to ease the pain of living
Everything else, drunken dumbshow….
