Hedwig Gorski

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Hedwig Gorski (born July 18, 1949) is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who refers to her work as "American futurism."

The term "performance poetry," which is a precursor to slam poetry, is traced to her.

It came from press releases devoted to experimental spoken word and experimental theater Gorski's creations in 1979.

She is a first-generation Polish academic scholar and a well-researched novelist.

The innovative poetry, prose, tragedy, and recording works are published and distributed in a variety of media using standard and experimental techniques.

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Career

Her public career began in New Orleans during 1973, illustrating for the infamous NOLA Express underground newspaper and hawking the new issues on the corner. 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. There, she befriended Delta blues musician Babe Stovall and often kept him company while he performed for tourists in Jackson Square receiving tips into his open guitar case. A video of them at New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival was made but lost.

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." 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 made famous by William Burroughs. The memoir titled Intoxication: 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 the psychic power of utterance and intent.

She never claimed close ties to the feminist movement, but feminists reportedly consider 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 and challenge what is 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. She had close ties with Gloria E. Anzaldúa, whose book Borderlands/La Frontera is considered a major work in Chicana feminist theory, Ricardo Sánchez, and raúlrsalinas, often performing with them at Resistencia Bookstore and elsewhere. During the Annual Polish American Historical Association (PAHA) conference in Washington, D.C. in 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 WASP culture.

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. She calls these persecuted groups "invisible minorities" in the United States because they are often of European heritage. Gorski's writing and career aligns with the struggles of all disadvantaged groups suffering from the hidden class warfare inside American society, and for this she has been called the "American Mayakovsky" from whom her motto "poetry is a hammer" is adapted.

When Bob 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 with Isabella Russell-Ides and many other performing poets Gorski collected and produced. Jazz writers and radio programmers were intrigued with poetry and music collaboration, but few practitioners dedicated their careers to doing only oral poetry and music, as did Gorski. Gorski has called herself a "performance poet" in press releases and interviews when describing what she did with East of Eden. She 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. The term was widely adopted to name the new genre by later practitioners in the mid-1980s, which is distinct within and parallel to the following practices: spoken word, slam, poetry readings, performed poetry, and performance art.

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 the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) during the late 1980s and to remove art studies from primary education."

She produced and funded projects to distribute works of performance-oriented literature outside the "mainstream". She also promoted and nurtured literature opposed to the establishment. She was a founding writer for The Austin Chronicle in 1980 initiating and naming the Litera column that discussed readings, books, and other matters of importance related to non-mainstream, alternative, and small press literature, especially poetry.

After her career in performance poetry 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. In 2003–04, Gorski lectured on minority American literature at the University of Wrocław in Poland as a Fulbright Fellow and spent five months traveling to various locations, including Ukraine. While backstage at Bob Dylan's concert in Prague, she met Václav Havel. She made an appearance at the Cafe Krzysztofory in Kraków in 2004 for the United States Embassy and the French Institute in Kraków before returning to the United States.

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Awards

• 2011 Finalist in 2011 National Poetry Series
• 2004 Southern Artistry Award
• 2003 Fulbright Scholar at University of Wroclaw, Poland
• 2002 Artist Fellowship in Audio Media, Louisiana Division of the Arts
• 2001 Robert and Bernice Webb Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching – Advanced Level. Department of English, University of Louisiana
• 2001 National Audio Theatre Festivals Script Writing Competition, for Thirteen Donuts
• 1994 Producer Fellowship from Corporation for Public Broadcasting at WWOZ, New Orleans
• 1990 Commemoration of International Women's Day Certificate on the occasion of a University Co-Op Book Signing Honoring Women Authors
• 1987 Best Use of Language Judges Award for performance poem "Mexico Solo" in Austin Music Umbrella Annual Songwriters Competition
• 1986 Honorable Mention for performance poem "Glitter Streets" in Austin Music Umbrella Annual Songwriters Competition