Hedwig Gorski

Hedwig Gorski is a neo-Beat poet who received awards for media works in poetry and drama. She coined the term "performance poetry" in the Austin Chronicle Litera column she founded during the early 1980s to describe her poems written only for oral performance. She recorded performance poems with composed music live on KUT-FM radio and produced The Texas Poets Audio Anthology Project featuring top oral writers. Gorski's best with her band, East of Eden Band, collected during live radio broadcasts were re-mastered and released on a CD Send in the Clown (2009). She published three books of poetry against her will due to popular demand and released many audio collections including a collector's edition chapbook with vinyl record titled Polish Gypsy with Ghost. Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street (Slough Press) 2007, 2009, is a memoir/archive about her 1978 experimental verse theater in Austin using William Burroughs's cut-up method to create a performance poetry theater. While reading an excerpt from the resulting script, Booby, Mama! at a Jack Kerouac Disembodied Poetics Conference, Allen Ginsberg booed her and signalled a thumbs down. That immediately made her a Beat heroine with the large audience since Beat poetry should be provocative and incite emotional responses from the audience. Unlike the Beat scene in Boulder, Colorado, where she read, her scene in Austin, Texas, was dominated by women Beats and others in the Austin underground of unique people from both sides of the freeway, which separated the barrio and eastside from the University of Texas drag and largely white sororities and fraternities at that time. Boundaries never mattered to Gorski, who forged deep aesthetic alliances with Resistencia poets and other passionate innovators and the older Beats who visited Austin to cause chaos and disrupt the good ol' boy Texas status quo.

Her BFA degree from NSCAD, a world famous radical art school in Nova Scotia, is in painting. Her doctorate in creative writing is from University of Louisiana. She received a Louisiana Artist's Fellowship (2002), and a Fulbright to lecture in Poland (2003). Some of her poems have been translated into Polish and published in Okolica. Excerpts from her 1978 neo-verse drama Booby, Mama! appear in a new issue of Karawane (2009), and the transcript of a television interview with Robert Creeley is in JAST, a Turkish journal. She appeared at the Jozi Spoken Word Festival 2009 in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the U. S. State Dept.