Rev. Danny Fisher

SnagFilms and YouTube have made available online for free download Jerry Aronson’s The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg. I thought it might be good to post the film (below) because of the great poet’s involvement in the American Buddhist movement: Ginsberg, who also studied Krishnaism and traveled through India, become a devoted student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche after meeting him randomly on the street in New York City. Along with fellow Beat writer Anne Waldman, he founded the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University (my graduate alma mater) in 1974. He was also the basis for the character “Alvah Goldbook” in his friend Kerouac’s much-beloved “novel” The Dharma Bums. For more on Ginsberg and his extensive relationship with the Buddhadharma, take a look at Tony Trigilio’s Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics and Michael Schumacher’s Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg.