Started in 1974, Bombay Gin is the literary journal of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics—co-founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman—at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Edited by students and department faculty, Bombay Gin publishes innovative poetry, prose and hybrid texts as well as art, translations and interviews. Emerging from the Outrider or left-hand lineage, which operates outside the cultural mainstream, Bombay Gin honors a heritage of powerful scholarship and counter-poetics through the publication of work that challenges the boundaries of language, form, and genre.
Bombay Gin 42
Reprogramming the Wilderness
the loneliness of staying too long in a
gentrified
neighborhood
tension of real
things that seem unreal
a door left
open in the skull as
a way out as
a tyranny to
let flow through the
wires in the wall
-CA Conrad
In our last issue we explored the walls of the city shaking. We delved into our collective and individual architectural and structural bodies. This year, we want to know what happens when the walls of our constructed and natural environments collapse. This is the new terrain somatic writer CA Conrad has been exploring: the wilderness which has been reprogrammed by human hands. We have been exploring our own evolution catalyzed by the paws and leaves of the wilderness. What kind of grid do we move onto now? How do we stem the flow of chaos without trying to tame the wild?
We want to know what structures are dying, and how. How do we build something new while still remaining true to those trailblazers who left signs for us to follow? The virtual jungle and the prairie grass; where do they meet? As the hunter and/or gatherer, of your own linguistic formulations, what new utterances communicate us over the binary fields? What is the environment of language and its various representations in the wilderness of the material and immaterial landscapes? How do we articulate nature? Through linguistic instinct? Marginal evolution? What is endangered and what is camouflaged? Is it possible to articulate a program that will ensure the survival of the disappearing and the decaying?
As humanity- as this collective- moves towards a new beginning, we are calling those brave enough to explore uncharted possibilities. We want the poems you've scraped into the lids of dumpsters, the lines you've left in the sand, the words you've carved into apples, and the poems you've texted yourself when there were no pens. We want to create trail marks off the beaten path. We are searching for those who can help us leave material, verbal, and virtual treasures in our wake.
As presence in the virtual web becomes increasingly valued, it is time to start paving a new perspective through that territory. We will be publishing a digital component of Bombay Gin 42 along with the journal in print. So send us your guide books, your secret clues, your scavenger hunts, and the coordinates. Send us your polished audio and video files: your videos, spoken word, your poetry put to song. Send us your photographs, paintings, book reviews, prose, poetry, hybrid, and cross-media work. Make sure to check out the blog for any updates at bombayginjournal.com. It is time to begin foraging through the rubble and leaving signs for those who will come next. Help us continue blazing into new mind fields. The deadline for submissions will be August 15, 2015.
General submission guidelines:
We welcome manuscripts of prose, poetry, and cross-genre work and submissions of two-dimensional visual art in black-and-white and color. Poetry submissions should be comprised of 3-5 poems; prose and cross-genre manuscripts should generally consist of no more than 15 pages; art submissions should be limited to 5 pieces. Please include a 100 word bio, email, and mailing address with your submission. We read through the submission deadline and won't have a response for your work until then, but general inquiries can be sent to bgin@naropa.edu, and more information can be found on our website, bombayginjournal.com.