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The great Naropa poetry wars

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This slim, hard-to-find polemic is an early source on the infamous and shadowy "Merwin Incident". Clark's primary source of information on the incident itself is the even harder to find "The Party, A Chronological Perspective on a Confrontation at a Buddhist Seminary", written by students in a Naropa class led by Ed Sanders. Clark is out for blood, and delivers in a relentlessly flippant, journalistic style. The more you know about the world Clark is circumscribing, the more quickly you spot errors and distortions, calculated to transmit Clark's disdain for not only Naropa and Vajradhatu (Trungpa's institutions) but the wider world of Tibetan Buddhism. Below, we will see also that Clark's work was calculated to create or exacerbate conflicts in the poetic community. Clark's work stands as a bracing antidote to the Trungpa community's propaganda machine, but Barry Miles' "Ginsberg: a Biography" may be more reliable and certainly appears to be more fair-minded, without shying from telling the story.

The incident took place in Snowmass, Colorado, at the Fall 1975 Seminary, a three month program intended for advanced, committed students of Trungpa. Poet W. S. Merwin and his girlfriend Dana Naone were allowed to join even though they did not have the established student-teacher relationship with Trungpa. This turned out to be a mistake, as the poet and his girlfriend brought with them an independent spirit not suitable for the environment. Two months in, Trungpa hosted a Halloween party, at which he showed up drunk and immediately got naked. Merwin and Naone retreated from the party to their room. Trungpa instructed his "Vajra Guard" to bring them back to the party, by force if necessary. Force was necessary. The Guard broke down the locked door to Merwin's room. Merwin smashed a bottle and used the broken end to fend them off, drawing blood, but ultimately the Guard captured their targets and brought them to the party. Trungpa threw sake in Merwin's face, racially insulted Naone, and demanded they remove their clothes. When they refused, he ordered his Guard to strip them. Naone asked the onlookers to help them or to call the police. Only one made a move in their defense, and got punched by Trungpa for his efforts. Trungpa then began punching the man stripping Naone for being too slow about it, so that man sped up by ripping off the remaining clothing. Then everyone else stripped and began to dance, and Merwin and Naone got back to their room.

That's the core story. The remaining 85 pages of the book describe Trungpa; his institutions, and their attempts to cover up and sanitize the incident; and other reports suggesting that the Merwin incident was not an exception, but rather a salient indicator of the nature of Trungpa's leadership.

There's a fifteen page interview with Allen Ginsberg, in which Ginsberg pathetically attempts to rationalize and excuse Trungpa's abuse. Other sources (including Miles) reveal that the Boulder Monthly removed Ginsberg's more respectful comments about Merwin and kept the less respectful ones. I don't know what Clark's motives were, but they weren't friendly. Keep this in mind as you read.

Appended letters from Ginsberg and from Anne Waldman (who cofounded, with Ginsberg, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa) show considerable sophistication in their calculated coolness (Waldman) and sweet humility (Ginsberg), but their actions speak louder than words, and even their words do not go far enough, going nowhere near the concept of an authority figure like Trungpa bearing any responsibility for his actions.

Wonderful, funny, and scary book about poetry, buddhism, and craziness. I read this years ago and want to re-read it again soon.

This book is one of the best books ever written on the contemporary poetry scene. It is smart, tough, and accurate.

Poetry abandoned its sense of reason, and in swept gangsters like Trungpa and Ron Padgett. Result: read all about it in Clark's book, if you can find a copy.

The same thing happened at Rajneeshpuram, and other hippy meccas. Sneaky finks calling themselves gurus swept into the vacuum left by the vacant minds of hippies, and the result was sheer terror.

What was that somebody said about eternal vigilance? I must have smoked too much pot. I can't remember.

Clark has a funny brutal sense of reality. I recommend all his books to anyone who wants to stay alive. He functions. While most of his generation of poets were just idiots swimming in swill, and happy to do so, Clark was a citizen that the founders of this republic would not have scorned. He is a man of principle, and God save the creeps that Clark chooses to ridicule.