Allen Ginsberg and Friends

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.