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 #43

In Conversation with the Experiment

“Can form make the pri­mary chaos (the raw material, the unorganized impulse and information, the uncertainty, incompleteness, vastness) articulate without depriving it of its capacious vitality, its generative power? Can form go even further than that and actually generate that potency, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation, and turning vastness into plenitude? In my opinion, the answer is yes; that is, in fact, the function of form in art. Form is not a fixture but an activity.”

It is this frenetic articulation, this active and generative space, which we think of around “the Experiment.” But perhaps we are putting words in the Experiment’s mouth? Perhaps it is time to have a conversation with the Experiment, to understand the relationship(s) we writers are trying to have/destroy/record/invent with the Experiment? 

Where did you last see the Experiment?  Is the Experiment present? Dying within a university? In bed with politics? Is it high on heroin? Is it starving? Does it 9-5? Is the Experiment in a womb of the internet? Is it new? Is it mid-thirties life crisis? Is it Brooklyn? Cincinnati? Mobile, Alabama?  Is it facing you with its hands up? Does it have throat cancer? Is it incarcerated? Is it sobbing? Is it pissed off? Is it stoned? Is it in the public school system? Is it a victim? Is it a perpetrator? Is it breathing? What happens when it runs out of time or page space? What is it telling you? And how will you respond?

We want to know what is at stake in experimental writing and experimental activism. We want to know what we can consider innovative. What remains fresh after seemingly all has been done and every territory has been contested? What borders are being pushed? What borders are being erected?

We are looking for: creative work of all (or no) genres; interviews; videos; visual art; digital pieces to be featured on our website; book reviews of new work; cross-media intersections.  We will be accepting submissions through August 15, 2016.  

As Hejinian describes, “Off-balance, heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward.” What is pulling you, and what are you dragging behind as you amble? Take notes, make transcripts, and send them our way, please.

General submission guidelines:

We welcome submissions of prose, poetry, and cross-genre work, interviews and non-fiction, and two-dimensional visual art in black-and-white and color. Poetry submissions should be comprised of 3-5 poems; prose, cross-genre, interviews, and non-fiction submissions should generally consist of no more than 15 pages; art, music, and video submissions should be limited to 5 pieces. Please include a 100 word bio, email, and mailing address with your submission. We read following the submission deadline and won't have a response for your work until after then, but general inquiries can be sent to bgin@naropa.edu, and more information can be found on our website, bombayginjournal.com.