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 department faculty, students and staff, 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 has published work by:
Kathy Acker
Sherman Alexie
Amiri Baraka
Charles Bernstein
Ted Berrigan
Rebecca Brown
Charles Bukowski
William Burroughs
Julie Carr
Wanda Coleman
Jack Collom
Clark Coolidge
Gregory Corso
Brenda Coultas
Robert Creeley
Mahmoud Darwish
Linh Dinh
Rikki Ducornet kari edwards
Zhang Er
Clayton EshlemanBrian Evenson
Allen Ginsberg
Peter Gizzi
Renee Gladman
Lyn Hejinian
Anselm Hollo
bell hooks
Laird Hunt
Lisa Jarnot
Bhanu Kapil
Rachel Levitsky
Nathaniel Mackey
Jackson MacLow
Peter Markus
Eileen Myles
Sawako Nakayasu
Hoa Nguyen
Alice Notley
Akilah Oliver
Jena Osman
Kenneth Patchen
Wang Ping
Joan Retallack
Elizabeth Robinson
Jerome Rothenberg
Ed Sanders
Selah Saterstrom
Eleni Sikelianos
Juliana Spahr
Lorenzo Thomas
Cecilia Vicuña
Anne Waldman
Rosemarie Waldrop
Lila Zemborain
…and many others
Each issue includes a talk or lecture transcribed from the Naropa Audio Archives. Called “one of the three most important literary audio collections in America” by The New York Times, the Archives are comprised of approximately six thousand hours of audio tapes documenting classes, performances, workshops and lectures conducted at Naropa by many of the leading figures of the U.S. literary avant-garde. The collection represents several generations of artists who have contributed to aesthetic and cultural change in the postmodern era.
Naropa University is a private American liberal arts university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1974 by Tibetan Buddhist teacher and Oxford University scholar Chögyam Trungpa, it is named for the eleventh-century Indian Buddhist sage Naropa, an abbot of Nalanda.
Naropa describes itself as Buddhist-inspired, ecumenical and nonsectarian rather than Buddhist. Naropa promotes non-traditional activities like meditation to supplement traditional learning approaches.
Naropa was accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools in 1988, making it the first Buddhist, or Buddhist-inspired, academic institution to receive United States regional accreditation. It remains one of only a handful of such schools.
Besides spirituality, Naropa is noteworthy for having hosted a number of Beat poets under the auspices of its Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
