Hedwig Gorski

‘‘‘Hedwig Gorski’’’ (July 18, 1949 - ) is a performance poet and author born in Trenton, New Jersey. 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. 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,” to the leading performance poetry in central Texas and on underground international radio.

A favorite on several KRVS-FM radio programs, her live broadcast performances with the East of Eden Band were recorded and distributed to radio stations around the world. These inadvertently became part of the 1980s audio cassette revolution against the overproduced commercial recordings of the monopolized recording industry during the Reagan-Bush years.

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. 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.

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. Her radical art school background influenced her fondness for performance text and the concept behind the manner of distribution. Even 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. Andy Warhol stunts like these added to the texts an ephemeral conceptual poetics that disappeared after the performance events.

The principle publication of her performance poems is titled ‘‘Snatches of the Visible Unreal,’’ 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, even though she does not sing. In a career that eschewed elitism of any sort, she used her own success to help produce and promote the recording of other non-academic vocal poets such as Raul 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 after his concert at the Austin Opry House.