Hedwig Gorski - Style

Style

Unlike the Beats, Gorski wrote her stylized narrative and moody lyrical poetry only for performance with the music composed by D'Jalma Garnier specifically for each poem. 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 (NSCAD) 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. Gorski, along with Vito Acconci, is considered one of the most notable graduates of NSCAD. She was directly influenced by Allen Ginsberg's Howl. They had a friendly enmity after he jeered one of her early readings at the Naropa University during the Jack Kerouac Disembodied Poetics Conference in the 1980s.

One of her early idols was Bob Dylan because she admired the "surreal images and obscured meanings in a language that rolled off the tongue." The passion and flow in the vocals matched those she heard on reel-to-reel tapes by Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet who initially inspired her. Bob Dylan came to Gorski's final reading/performance in Austin at the Mexic-Arte Museum’s Acoustic Festival in late 1992 after his concert at the Austin Opry House.