Hedwig Gorski

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Hedwig Gorski (born Trenton, New Jersey, July 18, 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" (Afterward. Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street, College Station: Slough Press, 2006. 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 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, (as witnessed by Dr. Mark Christal, Smithsonian Institute). 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 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.

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, Greg Gauntner, David Jewell, Joy Cole, and Pat Littledog. Bob Dylan came to her final reading in Austin at the Mexic-Arte Museum’s Acoustic Festival in 1992 after his concert at the Austin Opry House.

During 2003-04, 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/).

[edit] External links

• 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. East of Eden
• 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
• Gorski's Photojournal of her Fulbright 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