"Gorski, who is widely acknowledged as one of our most innovative and compelling poets, is first-generation Polish American. Echoes of Eastern Europe reverberate through her complex verbal interplay, lingering especially in her phrasing.” New Texas Magazine
Gorski’s audio recordings have been played on radio stations around the world and charted on several Canadian stations in rotation with Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Leonard Cohen. She has also produced successful audio poetry anthologies for broadcast. Most of her band recordings were recorded live while being broadcast on the radio program Live Set at KUT-FM. She performed live on KLRN, KAZI, KRVS, worked with WWOZ in New Orleans, and her audio was featured internationally on radio programs associated with alternative and spoken word programming during the independent audio revolution.
For a many years, people who heard about or saw the name did not know whether Hedwig Gorski was a man or woman. The name confused them until they heard her voice on the radio with her band. Some say that John Cameron Mitchell was inspired by this confusion to write Hedwig and the Angry Inch. This excerpt from her neo-verse drama Booby, Mama! (1978) shows the strong connection between Hedwig in Angry Inch and the hermaphrodite character, Krzysta.
Excerpt from the dialogue of the hermaphrodite character Krzysta in Gorski's 1978 found-text verse play Booby, Mama!:
"The skinny kid put her little-girl, pretty pink lips on an orange from the garbage sucking cool sweetness from the inside; as the green mold on the stiff skin couldn't resist the pull of her little-girlness and snuck inside as she sucked."
(OWNER fingers in sign language as she speaks.)
"'You don't have enough money to buy a piece of candy,' fingered the owner to the deaf girl."
View photos of Booby, Mama! productions/rehearsals from two different productions on FLICKR.
The entire script for Booby, Mama! is published in the new book by Slough Press titled Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street. Her art memoir chronicles the experimental production of the play and the antics of its found troupe of players. Sold on Amazon.com.
"These are possibilities and haunting spaces we could turn and return to in considering the significance of Gorski's Austin . . . unrecognizable in productive ways." Alan Clinton, Reconstruction from book review of Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street
Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it. Vladimir Mayakovsky
Gorski states: “The title of the CD, Send in the Clown, indicates my understatement of the poet in American society, shouting from the top of her lungs like an amusement similar to those Def Poets on television, with little or no consequence. Postmodern poetry is drowning in forgettable texts with nothing new or significant enough to compete even with conventional entertainment and technology. Twenty-first century poetry needs to reconnect with the inventive aesthetics found in deeper modernist roots and high-modernist masters, such as Eliot, Pound, and Gertrude Stein. I see my all-American avant-gardism in a sort of trendy global way as a continuation of Mayakovsky’s compassionate form of Russian Futurism. The poems I write express solidarity with a hidden third world in the United States.”
The Hedwig Gorski Glossaria of Coinage
Hedwig Gorski is known for coining words to describe unnamed culture and movements. She is best known for naming the "Performance Poetry" genre as a description of her work in the late 1970s to early 1990s. The term took off to describe poems written for staging instead of print. It is the antecendent of popular forms in the broader genre of Spoken Word, such as Slam.
Invisible minority - The European and other distinct national and ethnic cultural groups in America and elsewhere, such as Slavs and Roma, who are not visibly distinct and/or socially distinct for a variety of reasons. Poles, for example, disappear in White America. Whether this is a positive or negative aspect of the twentieth-century melting pot master narrative is debatable. An example of an invisible minority in Europe are Ukrainians who have been subsumed under the historic imperialist Russian culture. The Ukrainian language, culture, and history are distinct and unique, like all invisible minority cultures, and they also suffer some sort of discrimination as The Other culture. Another good example of the exotic quality acribed to the The Other invisible minority culture are Roma populations in Europe. Poet Darrell Bourque calls the word gypsy a "trope." For me, the gypsy trope is an exotic distillation, a remnant memory of Slavonic tribalism, and our Gorski family secret from a tragic settler's life in the outland Polish-Ukrainian territory of Galicia
Audio anthoology - The term for a collection of audio recordings from different poets assembled into a single collection originated with the production Austin Poets Audio Anthology Project, 1986, in Texas, produced and directed by Hedwig with grants from city coffers. The practice originated with John Giorno and others.
Litera - The name I gave to a so-called "high brow" column initiated about literature and events at the birth of The Austin Chronicle in 1981.
Voltaire's Basement - A place where aspiring intellectuals practice their writing arts undergound. The name was first applied to a bookstore-stage venue in Austin, Texas, in the early 1980s. View photos on FLICKR
Performance Poet (ry )- Originally used to describe Booby, Mama! (1977) a new verse drama before publication of the term in the Austin Chronicle Litera column (1981). Text-dominated performance art. Poetry written for or during performance instead of for print publication. Different from reading or theatrical tricks to present poems originally written to be published in books.
Neo-Verse Drama - Modern manifestations of the scripted and staged/produced theater that features poetry, usually free verse, in the dialogue. It must be written for at least two separate voices/characters in conversation, e.g. Booby, Mama! Otherwise, it is a spoken word monologue.
Post-postmodern - The dummying down in cultural democracy which came about due to both political neo-conservatism and liberal political correctness. The cultural black-hole beginning with attacks on the NEA in the 1990s. Aesthetic stagnanation in poetry: sameness and predictability due to decades of MFA poetry workshops.
Creative Literary Criticism - Inventive approaches that analyze serious literature validated by academics and vetted by reputable journals. Conceptual, philosophic and theoretical. Solid creative logic mixed with reputable analysis. Read this article for an example:
“The Riddle of Correspondences in A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance and H. D.’s Trilogy. Storytelling. Vol. 5 No. 4, Summer 2006, Washington: Heldref Publications, 223-35.
http://heldref.metapress.com/link.asp?id=q313132310w74675
Democratic Canon - Wiki-style approach to a valuation of literature. Works in concert with Academia to set standards, but eliminates the hegemony by academics. Inclusive and open-minded without degradation of literature to dross. An expanded definition of literature to include texts using contemporary media in addition to the printing press.
Artist-poets - Those who apply training and talents in the visual arts and in literature to invent and create the new approaches in poetry. They avoid formulaic and how-to approaches when writing in order to invent new aesthetic gains.
