Colorado Quagmire

Tom Clark’s book The Great Naropa Poetry Wars is a blistering and long out-of-print polemic against a certain strand of Buddhist thought then influential at Naropa. In short, the story goes that Chogyam Trungpa, who ran a local Buddihist organization, presided over a party in which W.S. Merwin and his then-girlfriend Dana Naone were stripped and publicly humiliated while the rest of the attendees either participated in their humiliation or looked on passively. The details of the incident have long been contested, and Clark’s book is one of the primary documents in the history of its narration. Now, thanks to the internet, you don’t have to spend hours in a special collections room to read the book—download out a scanned PDF here. (Thanks, @danielnester)