Hedwig Gorski | |
|---|---|
 Gorski inLouisiana, 2009 | |
| Born | Hedwig Irene Gorski (1949-07-18)July 18, 1949 (age 76) Trenton, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer, poet |
| Literary movement | Performance Poetry, Avant-Garde Poets, Media Artists,Postmodernism |
| Notable awards | Fulbright Fellowship 2003 |
| Spouse | D'Jalma Garnier |
Hedwig Irene Gorski (born July 18, 1949) is anAmericanperformance poet and anavant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as "Americanfuturism." The term "performance poetry," a precursor toslam poetry, is attributed to her. It originated in press releases for experimental spoken word and conceptual theater Gorski created during 1979.[1] She is a first-generationPolish American academic scholar and accomplished creative writer. The innovative poetry, prose, drama, and audio works are published and produced in a variety of media using standard and experimental forms.
A first-generation American citizen, born inTrenton, New Jersey, Gorski's parents and sister emigrated to the United States fromGalicia, Poland (present-dayUkraine) followingWorld War II, where two aunts and a grandmother were murdered[2] by Ukrainianpartisans.[3]
Her father joined thePolish Underground when aged fourteen, and later the United States Army, arriving with his family in the U.S. in 1949 on theGeneral Sturgis, which docked inNew Orleans, Louisiana.[2] Her father did electrical work inNapoleonville before moving toNew Jersey. After receiving aBachelor of Fine Arts in painting from theNova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Canada, she moved with her first husband toAustin, Texas in 1977.[4] She is married to her second husband, composerD'Jalma Garnier.[5]
Her public career began in New Orleans during 1973, illustrating for the infamousNOLA Expressunderground newspaper and hawking the new issues on the corner.[6] The archives ofNOLA Express are now housed in theUniversity of Connecticut. Gorski andCharles Bukowski are two of the most notable contributors to theNOLA Express. There, she befriendedDelta blues musicianBabe Stovall and often kept him company while he performed for tourists inJackson Square receiving tips into his open guitar case. A video of them atNew Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival was made but lost.[7]
Soon after moving to Austin, she divorced and began her poetry and theater careers in earnest by falling into the "[a]tmospheric landscape of the town that summoned and intoxicated so many beloved ... artists of the time toward intense self-actualization."[8] She completed, produced, and directed aone-act play script with the titleBooby, Mama! that is an inventive form she named "neo-verse drama". The artmemoir of the production states that the verse play was based on aconceptual art cut-up form of writing made famous byWilliam Burroughs. The memoir titledIntoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street details the events in 1978 that are described as the birth of performance poetry as an American regional avant-garde joining the activity of the body to thepsychic 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 thefeminist movement,[9] but feminists reportedly consider her work to contain powerful statements about the disparity caused byrace andgender in the United States. The images in her poetry are womanly and challenge what ispolitically correct according to the feminist dictum of the time, and they reflect a protest against the complacency and inaction of artists and non-conformists.[10] She had close ties withGloria E. Anzaldúa, whose bookBorderlands/La Frontera is considered a major work in Chicana feminist theory,Ricardo Sánchez, andraúlrsalinas, often performing with them at ResistenciaBookstore and elsewhere.[11][12] During the Annual Polish American Historical Association (PAHA) conference inWashington, D.C. in 2008, Gorski read from "Mexico Solo", a longprose poem that she used to introduce howPolish Americans are more closely related to all 'hyphenated'minority cultures than to the majority AmericanWASP culture.[13]
On the conference panel,Polish American poets Stephen Lewandowski and Joseph Lisowski discussed how blatant discrimination and negativestereotyping circulated by Polishjokes plagued their childhoods. She calls these persecuted groups "invisible minorities" in the United States because they are often of European heritage.[14] Gorski's writing and career aligns with the struggles of all disadvantaged groups suffering from the hidden class warfare insideAmerican society, and for this she has been called the "AmericanMayakovsky" from whom her motto "poetry is a hammer" is adapted.[15]
WhenBob Holman first heard an audio cassette of Gorski with East of Eden Band, he told New York poet Michael Vecchio that it was the best band he had heard. Vecchio is one of those featured in the Poets Audio Anthology Project, Vol. II, along withIsabella Russell-Ides and many other performing poets Gorski collected and produced.Jazz writers and radio programmers were intrigued with poetry and musiccollaboration, but few practitioners dedicated their careers to doing onlyoral poetry and music, as did Gorski.[16] Gorski has called herself a "performance poet" inpress releases andinterviews when describing what she did with East of Eden.[17] She first coined the term "performance poetry" to name her style of writing poetry fororal presentation, instead of for print publication, in a 1981 press release.[14] The term was widely adopted to name the newgenre by later practitioners in the mid-1980s, which is distinct within and parallel to the following practices:spoken word, slam,poetry readings, performed poetry, andperformance art.[17]
Gorski sees poets in American society as a disenfranchised minority group with a history of prosecution by the American government for obscenity when 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 theNational Endowment for the Arts (NEA) during the late 1980s and to remove art studies from primary education."[18]
She produced and funded projects to distribute works of performance-oriented literature outside the "mainstream". She also promoted and nurtured literature opposed to theestablishment. She was a founding writer forThe Austin Chronicle in 1980 initiating and naming theLitera column that discussed readings, books, and other matters of importance related to non-mainstream,alternative, andsmall press literature, especially poetry.[19][20]
After her career in performance poetry during the 1980s, Gorski enteredgraduate school in theUniversity of Louisiana at Lafayette and was awarded a doctorate, Ph.D. inCreative Writing, in 2001.[2] In 2003–04, Gorski lectured on minorityAmerican literature at theUniversity of Wrocław in Poland as aFulbright Fellow and spent five months traveling to various locations, including Ukraine. While backstage atBob Dylan's concert inPrague, she metVáclav Havel.[21] She made an appearance at the Cafe Krzysztofory inKraków in 2004 for theUnited States Embassy and the French Institute inKraków before returning to the United States.
She coined the term "Performance Poetry" in the early 1980s after initiating and writing the "Litera" column for theAustin Chronicle in an effort to distinguish her performed poetry from performance art.[22] She was also one of the founding writers on theAustin Chronicle, which helped to promote the vibrant "music capital of the world" that Austin, 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, what she calls a "pedestrianavant-garde".[23]
Gorski's live broadcast performances onKUT-FM were recorded and distributed to radio stations internationally. They became part of the 1980s Indie audio cassette/radio station network offering alternatives to commercial music. Her literature-based broadcast audio increased the popularity of performance poetry, the genre she named to describe her own work: literature-based poetry written for performance only and not for print publication.[24]
East of Eden, formed of professionaljazz 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"[25] voicing as close to singing as possible without actually singing.[26] The compositions written for each poem byD'Jalma Garnier ranged fromjazz tocountry and western torock and roll[27][28]
Unlike theBeats, Gorski wrote her stylizednarrative and moodylyrical poetry only for performance with the music composed byD'Jalma Garnier specifically for each poem. The poetry was meant foraudio distribution only, especially for the radio (as opposed to print). Herradicalart school background influenced her fondness for performancetext and the concept behind the manner of distribution. Though she received adegree in painting from theNova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Canada, she did not like theelitism of thegallery circuit. She transferred her love of images into apoetics that also incorporated the anti-capitalist, socialist un-doings found in performance art and conceptual art.[29] Gorski, along withVito Acconci, is considered one of the most notable graduates of NSCAD. She was directly influenced byAllen Ginsberg's "Howl". They had a friendly enmity after he jeered one of her early readings atNaropa University during theJack Kerouac Disembodied Poetics Conference in the 1980s.[30]
One of her early idols wasBob Dylan because she admired the "surreal images and obscured meanings in a language that rolled off the tongue." The passion and flow in the vocals matched those she heard on reel-to-reel tapes byDylan Thomas, the Welsh poet who initially inspired her. 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.[31]
The first publication of her performance poems is titledSnatches of the Visible Unreal from Backyard Press, which is also the title of her first audio cassette recording. Another chapbook titledPolish Gypsy with Ghost contains a vinyl recording. The second audio cassette release is titledEast 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 includingraúlrsalinas,Roxy Gordon, and Joy Cole. Several other print collections of poetry were produced in limited additions, includingEarly breakfast with Hedwig Gorski andThe East of Eden Band Songbook. A remastered CD, containing a selection of radio recordings by Gorski and East of Eden from live broadcasts was released in 2009, calledSend in the Clown.[32]
The archival and remastered recordings by Hedwig Gorski®[14] and East of Eden Band along with a radio drama,Thirteen Donuts, which she wrote and directed forKRVS-FM and simulcast on the web, are available for download oniTunes. A more extensive listing of creative and scholarly publications and productions by the artist-poet is available online (seeHedwig Gorski's online CV with permission request from official website).
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