Hedwig Gorski

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Hedwig Gorski (born New Jersey, 1949) is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as American Futurism. She is a first-generation Polish-American who is both an academic scholar and populist writer.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Career 2.1 Performance poet 2.2 Populist writer 2.3 Scholar 3 Accomplishments 4 Style 4.1 Ties to Conceptual Art 5 Publications and recordings 6 Notes and references 7 External links

[edit] Biography

The poet has characterized her life as that of a Slavic gypsy due to a family history of displacement along with her own penchant for traveling. Her parents and sister immigrated to the United States from Poland's frontier, Galicia, in what is now Ukraine after World War II on the General Sturgis which docked in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her father did electrical work in Napoleonville before they moved to New Jersey. Gorski describes her ethnic background as first-generation Polish American, a distinct cultural group that is among what she describes as the "invisible European minorities" in the United States. She received a Catholic primary education in private schools that nurtured her creative spirit and high intelligence. After receiving a Bachelors of Fine Arts in painting from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University [NSCAD] in Canada, she moved with her first husband to Austin, Texas. ^[1]

[edit] Career

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 are Polish Americans.

Soon after moving to Austin, she divorced and began her poetry and theater careers in earnest by falling into the "atmospheric landscape of the town that summoned and intoxicated so many beloved . . . artists of the time toward intense self-actualization." ^[2] She completed, produced, and directed a one-act play script with the title Booby, Mama! that is an inventive form she named "neo-verse drama." The art memoir of the production states that the verse play was based on a conceptual art cut-up form of writing created by William Burroughs. The memoir titled Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street details the events in 1978 that are described as the birth of performed poetry as an American regional avant-garde joining the activity of the body to the psychic power of utterance and intent.

"The conceptual process . . . seems impossible to pull off. There was no money, and it used 'found' text and 'street' actors . . . filled with existential angst living on the fringes of society."

She never claimed close ties to the Feminist movement, but feminists considered her work to contain powerful statements about the disparity caused by race and gender in the United States. The images in her poetry are womanly more so than politically correct according to the feminist dictum of the time, and they reflect a protest against the complacency and inaction of artists and non-conformists, too. ^[3] She had close ties with Austin colleague Gloria E. Anzaldúa^[4], whose book Borderlands/La Frontera is considered a major work in Chicana feminist theory, Ricardo Sanchez ^[5], and Raul Salinas, often performing with them at Resistencia Bookstore.

During the Annual Polish American Historical Association (PAHA) conference in Washington, DC, 2008, Gorski read from “Mexico Solo,” a long prose poem that she used to introduce how Polish Americans are more closely related to all hyphenated minority cultures than to the majority American culture.^[6] On the conference panel, Polish American poets Stephen Lewandowski and Joseph Lisowski discussed how blatant discrimination and negative stereotyping circulated by Polish jokes plagued their childhoods. Gorski’s writing and career aligns with the struggles of all disadvantaged groups suffering from the hidden disparity inside American society, and for this she has been called the “American Mayakovsky.” ^[7]

[edit] Performance poet

When Bob Holman first heard an audio cassette of Hedwig Gorski with East of Eden Band, he exclaimed to New York poet Michael Vecchio that they were the best poetry and music band he had ever heard. Jazz writers and radio programmers were intrigued with poetry and music collaborations, but few practitioners dedicated their careers to the doing only oral poetry and music, as did Hedwig Gorski.^[8] She never wrote poems for publication and exhibited, it is said by observers, a disdain toward the inbred society of print poetry journals, especially the tradition of requiring poets to pay publishers when submitting poems for consideration.^[9] She remained an uncompromising rebel among traditional or established poetry circles, but bridged a gap with non-reading audiences by performing on television and radio since the 1980s.

She is credited for naming herself a "performance poet" to describe what she did with the East of Eden Band in press releases and interviews.^[10]. Gorski first coined the term "performance poetry" to name her style of writing poetry for oral presentation instead of for print publication in a 1981 press release.^[11] The term was adopted to name the genre by practitioners, which is distinct from spoken word, poetry readings, performed poetry, and performance art.

[edit] Populist writer

Gorski saw poets in American society as a disenfranchised minority group with a long history of persecution by the American government for exercising the freedom of speech. “Experimental and avant-garde artists and poets were demonized during the early 1990s by the efforts of a conservative agenda to eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) during the late 1980s and to remove art studies from primary education.” Literary experimentation and radical art movements were exempt from public recognition and support through censorship based on religious morals and political correctness. Decades of philistinism were initiated from the public outcry against aesthetically excellent artworks with objectionable subject matter. ^[12]

She often produced and funded projects to help distribute the work of performance oriented literature that was not considered mainstream. Gorski promoted and nurtured the creation of daring literature against the establishment using her own popularity and access to mass media. She was a founding writer for The Austin Chronicle in 1980 initiating and naming the “Litera”^[13] column that discussed readings, books, and other matters of importance related to non-mainstream, alternative, and small press literature, especially poetry. ^[14]

Gorski’s efforts in conjunction with a community of regional activists brought minority and women writers with stronger and more challenging voices to the attention of the international public by promoting cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary avant-gardism on the radio as part of her postmodern populist agenda. “I can't get over how good this stuff sounds and how important regional poetry can be."^[15]

[edit] Scholar

After a successful career as a performance poet during the 1980s, Gorski entered graduate school in the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and was awarded a doctorate, Ph.D. in Creative Writing, in 2001.^[16] She received a Fulbright Fellowship to lecture about minority American literature in Poland.

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.^[17] She made an appearance at the Cafe Krzystofore in Kraków in 2004 for the United States Embassy and The French Institute in Kraków before returning to the United States.^[18]

[edit] Accomplishments

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. ^[19] 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).

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

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 are available for download on ITunes since 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.

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.^[20] The compositions ranged from jazz to country and western to rock and roll^[21]. The crucial factor for the success of East of Eden Band and Hedwig Gorski is a match of sound to each narrative poem’s story, and the match to the mood in the lyric and meaning. In traditional poetry, these correlate to poetic diction.

[edit] Style

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.^[22] Gorski, along with Vito Acconci, is considered one of the most notable graduates of NSCAD. (See Nova Scotia College of Art and Design).

She was directly influenced by Allen Ginsberg's Howl. They had a friendly enmity after he 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.

She is considered Post-Beat or Neo-Beat by some, (See Performance Poetry), but her use of multi-media and fascination with all technology ties her further back to Futurism and Mayakovsky. Her literary and visual art education and practices expand her uses of electronic media beyond the uses by the Beats like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac who recorded, filmed, or televised more traditional readings to distribute printed literature. The glorification of Beat obsessions in the literature, especially womanizing and the glorification of sexual exploitation by Ginsberg's man-boy love promotion exclude women and "exlude me categorically," she explained in a video interview at the University of Texas.

One of her early idols was Bob Dylan because she admired the "surreal images and obscured meanings in a language that rolled off the tongue."^[23] His passion and flow in the vocals matched those she heard on reel-to-reel tapes by Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet from whom Bob Dylan borrowed an alias. Bob Dylan came to Gorski's final reading/performance in Austin at the Mexic-Arte Museum’s Acoustic Festival in late 1992 after his concert at the Austin Opry House.

[edit] Ties to Conceptual Art

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.^[24] For Gorski, such Andy Warhol-inspired stunts as this added to her text an ephemeral conceptual poetics. Her use of conceptual and pedestrian poetics places Gorski's body of interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary work within the realm of postmodernism.

[edit] Publications and recordings

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.

Several other print collections of poetry were produced in limited additions, including early breakfast with Hedwig Gorski and The East of Eden Band Songbook.

A remastered CD^[25] containing a selection of the best radio recordings by Hedwig Gorski and East of Eden band from live broadcasts was released in 2009. It is titled Send in the Clown.^[26]

The archival and remastered recordings by Hedwig Gorski and East of Eden Band along with a radio drama titled Thirteen Donuts, which she wrote and directed and that aired on KRVS-FM radio and simulcast on the web are available for download on ITunes in 2009.

A more extensive listing of creative and scholarly publications and productions by the "gypsy artist-poet"^[27] online.

[edit] Notes and references

[edit] 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. Official Gorski Site

• Latest CD of performance poetry from radio broadcasts is Send in the Clown
• Latest book: A 1978 art memoir, verse drama, women's dada theater, About the book and author headshot
• Clinton, Alan. Book Review of Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street. Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 7.3 (2007). [1]
• Publisher of Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street website Slough Press Books
• Poets & Writers Directory Photo of Hedwig Gorski [2]
• Poem audio "From Box to Living Room to Box" 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: CV, Resume
• Gorski, Hedwig. Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street. College Station, TX: Slough P, 2007. For sale on Amazon.com. Contact: HeathcliffonPowellStreet@gmail.com. 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. [3]
• 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: 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: Hedwig Gorski's Photojournal of Fulbright Fellowship
• Mark Christal's Photos of Poets and Jack Kerouac Conference [4]
• Photos of Hedwig Gorski at Voltaires Basement, a bookstore and underground arts venue on FLICKR [5]