Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso’s 1989 discussion continues from here with a discussion of the early days of Naropa
GC: (music in background) ….(I want to talk about the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics), that’s very close to you, and that’s really unique, I think in America you know, it’s like, a poetry institute, but under the aegis of Naropa Institute. Now that the man who initiated all that made it all has died. Is it still going on, Naropa?
AG: Yeah. Anne Waldman is running the poetics program and the school has, of course, suffered a lot of blows and buffets because of various scandals … and the death of the leader
AG: Yeah, who was a great lama and a great poet and a great meditation teacher and was my guru
GC: Your guru?
AG: ….and his idea in founding Naropa was to teach the Buddhists golden tongue and give the poets some kind of discipline in meditation so that both sides would profit, and it’s worked out really well, so that, now that he’s gone, the place needs a meditation teacher, basically.
GC: I’ll say.
AG: It needs a spiritual head.
GC: Didn’t he leave someone behind his heir?
AG : Yeah, there’s Ozel Tendzin, who’s ill [Editorial note this is 1989, Ozel Tendzin died the following year] – so it’s been very inactive the last couple of years.
GC: Ok.
AG: So what’s needed now is… what we had this summer was a Zen master, Kobun Chino Sensei
So for the first time in years everybody got up at seven in the morning and showed up at eight and sat for an hour…
GC: Oh
AG: …and then nine o’clock went about our daily business And Anne organized an MFA program, which has lasted pretty long, which is working out really well, because, all of a sudden we found mommies couldn’t send their kids to gamble on an undergraduate education but grown-up people, who had their own money and their own choice, would come out for a Master of Fine Arts.
GC: Ok
AG: So we got more people than we could handle. We had to turn people away!
to be continued