Poet's Apprentice: At the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Book One: January-March 1980

by Randy Roark

In January 1980, Randy Roark began an apprenticeship with Allen Ginsberg in Boulder Colorado. It was also his first semester at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, part of Naropa Institute. That semester he studied literary criticism with Stanley Fefferman, Basic Poetics with Allen Ginsberg, and Tai Chi. This also was the beginning of Naropa Institute's 100-year experiment in transforming education, which began with a course with Buddhist scholar Reggie Ray on the intellectual and historical background to the founding of Naropa Institute which was based on the model of Nalanda, a Buddhist university that lasted almost 750 years until 1200 in what is now Bihar, India. In addition to contemporary class notes, journal entries, essays, correspondence, and stories from that semester, he has written several essays contextualizing what was taught and how it affected him.

The first volume of this series also includes a brief history of Naropa Institute, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and an annotated index of recordings available in the Naropa Audio Archives 1974-1979.

Roark continued to study and eventually work for the Kerouac School until the Summer of 1985, where this collection of books will eventually end.

238 pages, Paperback

Published November 17, 2021