Hedwig Gorski

Hedwig Gorski (born New Jersey, 1949) is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist. She describes her ethnic background as first-generation Polish-American, a distinct cultural group that is among what she calls the "invisible European minorities" in the United States. She coined the term "Performance Poetry" in the early 1980s while writing the "Litera" column for the "Austin Chronicle" in an effort to distinguish her performed poetry from performance art (The Austin Chronicle). She was also one of the founding writers on the "Austin Chronicle", which helped to promote the vibrant "music capital of the world" that the capital of Texas had become. Along with the growth of the music scene, a multi-ethnic theater, literature, and art community began to coalesce during the 1970s. This is the environment from which Gorski’s work grew from its mysterious underground, a "pedestrian avant-garde" (Afterword. Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street, College Station: Slough Press, 2007. pg. 82).

A favorite on several KUT-FM radio programs, her live broadcast performances with the East of Eden Band were recorded and distributed to radio stations around the world. They became part of the 1980s independent audio cassette/radio station network which offered radical or innovative music and sound art during conservatism of the Reagan-Bush years (Sound Choice Magazine, 1986).

The East of Eden Band, formed of professional jazz musicians, was successful because the music and poetry were melded together exclusively for performance. Gorski’s spoken vocals have been described as bringing her eerie voicing as close to singing as possible without actually singing. The compositions ranged from jazz to country and western to rock and roll, with the crucial factor being a match of sound to each narrative poem’s meaning. She was directly influenced by Allen Ginsberg, who jeered one of her early readings at the Naropa University during the Jack Kerouac Disembodied Poetics Conference in the 1980s (http://www.flickr.com/photos/markchristal/sets/72157603768419822/). Later, her composer husband, D’Jalma Garnier, accompanied Ginsberg at an Austin Liberty Lunch reading, where other Beat poets such as Gregory Corso, Bob Micheline, Gary Snyder, Peter Orlovsky, and neo-Beat Andy Clausen read at times. Snyder called Gorski's poems "surreal," and Corso called her his "big Texas girl" even though she is from New Jersey.

Unlike the Beats, Gorski wrote her stylized narrative and moody lyrical poetry only for performance with the music composed by Garnier. The poetry was meant for audio distribution only, especially for the radio (as opposed to print). Her radical art school background influenced her fondness for performance text and the concept behind the manner of distribution. Though she received a degree in painting from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada, she did not like the elitism of the gallery circuit. She transferred her love of images into a poetics that also incorporated the anti-capitalist, socialist un-doings found in Performance Art and Conceptual Art (Afterword. Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street, College Station: Slough Press, 2007). Gorski, along with Vito Acconci, is considered one of the most notable graduates of NSCAD.

When scheduled for individual readings without the band, Gorski would employ concepts that either intrigued or baffled the audiences. While waiting her turn at a two-day performance event held at the Gaslight Theater in Austin, she searched out and hired a street person from among the drunkards who panhandled the cultural district tourists to read a long poem about the Hippie generation burnout. Some in the Gaslight audience thought the drunk in the spotlight introduced as Gorski, whom she hurriedly coached for the reading, was the poet. For Gorski, such Andy Warhol-inspired stunts as this added to her text an ephemeral conceptual poetics.

The first publication of her performance poems is titled "Snatches of the Visible Unreal" from Backyard Press, which is also the title of her first audio cassette recording. Another chapbook titled "Polish Gypsy with Ghost" contains a vinyl recording. The second audio cassette release is titled "East of Eden Band," for which Gorski used the name Hedwig G-G. Her poems received music lyric awards, rather than literature awards, though she never sang. In a career that eschewed elitism, she used her own success to help produce and promote the recording of other non-academic vocal poets including Raúl Salinas, Roxy Gordon, and Joy Cole. Bob Dylan came to her final reading/performance in Austin at the Mexic-Arte Museum’s Acoustic Festival in 1992 after his concert at the Austin Opry House.

The archival and remastered recordings by Hedwig Gorski and East of Eden Band along with a radio drama she wrote and directed that aired on KRVS-FM radio and simulcast on the web in 2000 will be available for download on ITunes in 2008. Gorski's work helped to legitimize the genre she named. The artistic success that the live radio recordings achieved is lately considered a standard against which the resurgence of interest in performance poetry, especially in Europe, is taking place. The validation of her own performance poetry in academia is a goal she achieved after receiving a Ph.D. in creative writing. "It is now my taste in the literary arts that influences the canon of academic literature," she wrote in an email to colleague Dr. Mark Christal. Her public career began in New Orleans illustrating for the infamous NOLA Express underground newspaper during 1973. The archives of NOLA Express are now housed in the University of Connecticut. Gorski and Charles Bukowski are two of the most notable contributors to the NOLA Express, and both Polish Americans.

During 2003-04, Dr. Gorski lectured at the University of Wrocław in Poland on a Fulbright Fellowship and spent five months traveling to various locations, including Ukraine. While backstage at Bob Dylan's concert in Prague, Czech Republic, she met Václav Havel. She made an appearance at the Cafe Krzystofore in Cracow in 2004 for the United States Embassy and The French Institute in Cracow before returning to the United States (http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~hig0162/).

External links

Official Hedwig Gorski contains photos, publications and links to other sites relevant to performance poetry, spoken word, and the history of slam involving the Gorski poetry/art. [http://hedwig.gorski.site.googlepages.com/ "Official Gorski Site"]
* Latest book: A 1978 art memoir, verse drama, women's dada theater, [http://hedwig.gorski.visual.art.googlepages.com/hedwiggorski'sexperimentaldadatheater "About the book and author headshot"]
* Clinton, Alan. Book Review of "Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street." "Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture" 7.3 (2007). [http://reconstruction.eserver.org/073/clinton2.shtml]
* Publisher of "Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street" website [http://SloughPressBooks.googlepages.com/home "Slough Press Books"]
* Poets & Writers Directory Photo of Hedwig Gorski [http://www.pw.org/content/hedwig_gorski]
* Poem audio "From Box to Living Room to Box" [http://indieonestop.com/jamroom/bands/391/entry.php "Listen to performance poem recorded live on KUT-FM radio with East of Eden Band"]
* CV and resume with links to pdf files for download: [http://Hedwig.Gorski.Litera.googlepages.com/home "CV, Resume"]
* Gorski, Hedwig. "Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street." College Station, TX: Slough P, 2007. For sale on Amazon.com. Contact: [e-mail]. [http://home.bellsouth.net/p/PWP-IntoxicationHeathcliffonPowellStreet "Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street book info"]
* Audio excerpts from a few East of Eden live recordings are available online at SouthernArtistry.org - an adjudicated, online registry of Southern artists. Contact information for her appearances are available on this site. [http://www.southernartistry.org/Hedwig_Gorski]
* The text of her poem, "There's Always Something That Can Make You Happy," is available in English and Polish in the Poetry Repairs online journal: [http://www.poetryrepairs.com/v06/034.html#Q2 "Poetry Repairs"]
* Dr. Gorski's Photojournal of her Fulbright Fellowship in Poland are available online. The photos take a long time to load but are worth waiting for: [http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~hig0162 "Hedwig Gorski's Photojournal of Fulbright Fellowship"]
* Mark Christal's Photos of Poets and Jack Kerouac Conference [http://www.flickr.com/photos/markchristal/sets/72157603768419822/]
* Photos of Hedwig Gorski at Voltaires Basement, a bookstore and underground arts venue on FLICKR [http://flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=Hedwig+Gorski&m=text]