Editor's Note

Bombay Gin 34.3 Summer 2008

Disappearing on Breath: Writings From
The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

This is the inaugural summer feature edition of Bombay Gin dedicated to the works of the Kerouac School founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. Within the forthcoming pages, you will find selections from the faculty, students, alumni, and lineage.

As someone who belongs to this community, I am often asked two things: What is the Jack Kerouac School? And why is its poetics disembodied? I will attempt to provide my own perspective in the effort to convey its importance in this edition. To the first, it’s the Department of Writing and Poetics, a year-round wing of the school that houses the MFA in Writing & Poetics as well as the BA in Writing and Literature. It’s the Low-Residency MFA program’s Creative Writing degree. It’s the Summer Writing Program, a four- week-long experience that brings the forces above together. As for the disembodied portion of our namesake, the poet Elizabeth Robinson, in a panel during this year’s Summer Writing Program, inspired me when she said:

“The breach between the disembodied and the material is what, perhaps, we recognize and try to repair through the embodied medium of language, but words too disappear on breath.”

At the time of its utterance, only two days before this note, Robinson was exploring the vast topic of writing itself. She had no idea I would find it such a resonant interpretation of the Kerouac school’s aim. But of course, it’s what the school is and always has been about—writing.

Until they disappear,

Samuel Knights
Editor-in-Chief, Bombay Gin 34
June 25, 2008