A 100th Birthday Garland for Allen Ginsberg

Political activist Abbie Hoffman, speaking at the Jack Kerouac Festival in 1982, said that the social movements of the 1960s would not have happened without the cultural revolution of the 1950s. Poet Allen Ginsberg was the spokesman for the Beat Generation literary movement, and a powerful voice for civil rights, free speech, and the peace movement, his entire life.

Ginsberg and Kagyu Tibetan lineage holder, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, founded Naropa Institute – now University in Boulder, Colorado. Allen’s Buddhist meditation practice and poetics entailed keen observations of the ordinary. We’ve gone into the AR Archive, and recordings from a few musical performances in celebration of his one-hundredth birthday.

Speaker: Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg was one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression. Ginsberg is best known for his epic poem “Howl,” in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist, Chögyam Trungpa, founder of the Naropa Institute, now Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. At Trungpa’s urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there in 1974. He passed away in 1997.

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