HEDWIG GORSKI
RHYMES AND RHYTHMS OF EDEN: INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL LUIMNIOS
Hedwig Gorski is an artist-poet. She coined the term “performance
poetry” to describe her spoken words recorded during radio broadcasts with East
of Eden Band. She published three books of poetry and released several
audio collections before 1994. Her BFA degree from NSCAD, a world famous
radical art school, is in painting. She received a doctorate in creative
writing in 2001, Louisiana Artist’s Fellowship in 2002, and a Fulbright to lecture
in Poland in 2003. Artistic influences include the avant-garde and experimental
across genres such as conceptual art and Beat poetry including individual
artists and writers such as Mayakovsky, Warhol,
Pound, Eliot, Philip Glass, John Cage, Jim Jarmusch,
Dylan, Polanski, Milosz, and Szymborska. She has been
called the American Mayakovsky for her playfulness,
optimism, and attachment to the working class and farmers. In 1976, she
received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Nova Scotia College of
Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Canada then returned to the South and
Southwest. In Austin, Texas, Gorski's journey of
invention and intense self-discovery continued after finding a foundation for
it in New Orleans during 1973-74.
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. For 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.
Michael Limnios: Poetry and music––can these two arts
confront the organized government “prison” of the spirit and mind?
Hedwig Gorski: Absolutely,
poetry and music, together especially, should confront any organized government
“prison” of the spirit and mind, as you state it so aptly. Every movement had
its artists to inspire the masses and keep rebellion alive. I see the role of
poets, supreme word artists, as a political one, to articulate for those
disenfranchised or abused by bureaucratic systems. Even when there is no
official protest movement by citizens, poets should probe and instigate the
ills that are under wraps but destroy or have the potential to destroy the well-being of citizens. The ability to be an “antennae for
the human race” as Pound stated it requires that poets take risks and use their
abundant skills to penetrate the state of affairs for the purpose of improving
them. In every culture throughout history, poets have been murdered for this
ability to instigate listeners and readers while using coded rhetoric to fly
under the radar. Music added to poetry makes it more entertaining expanding the
audience while adding yet another cloak of deception to hide volatile political
and social messages from authorities. My chief annoyance with my colleagues and
about most contemporary poetry in the United States is the lack of provocative
content, either intellectually, aesthetically, or
politically.
We should write quotably and aphoristically
about evil and oppression by power mongers to provide rebels and leaders
mantras for the progress of good. Let the most sensitively intelligent lead:
first, expressions of reality; then, actions to change negative reality. Who
can articulate it better than cognoscente.
Additionally, publishers should take risks to publish the best. We should be in
court fighting for our revelations and piercing expression like the Beats and
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights press in San
Francisco did during the 1950s.
ML: What
was the relation between music, poetry and activism?
HG: Let’s narrow it down to the twentieth
century and provide some background to discuss the relationship between
activism, music and poetry: First, activism always had its anthems and slogans
to rally the people. Why shouldn’t the political slogan makers be poets instead
of speech writers and advertising executives? In
oppressed nations, the poet’s ability to speak in metaphors creates secret
codes that communicate ideas, support, plans, and messages to the activists and
citizens using public speech yet keeping the writers and speakers safe from
government persecution. Poetry is a sophisticated secret code that the
initiated can decipher when need be. That is why totalitarian regimes
immediately murder the poets, intelligentsia, and artists along with professors
and others capable of free thinking, daring, and exercising free speech, as
Anne Applebaum points out correctly in her new book Iron Curtain, an examination of how
totalitarianism operated in Eastern Europe during 1944-1956. Those living in
censored societies, like Iran today, love and read their poets as they hunger
for news of their situation with aching desire to enjoy human rights.
Poland’s fight against Stalin’s oppression
produced two contemporary postwar Noble Laureates who were also politically
engaged poets, Milosz and Szymborska, plus others
like Zbigniew Herbert, who was also considered for a
Nobel. When governments oppress their citizens, then poets become the voices
for the oppressed. Poetry is even more capable of getting past censors than
song lyrics or bombastic and confessional raps because poets tend to stay under
the radar more effectively with their studious, academic, or seemingly harmless
writer nerd personas. Even public eccentrics like the Beats were seen more like
clowns and buffoons instead of serious threats by a majority of people. Here is
a democracy where free speech protects clowns and buffoons as well erudition.
Whether coupled correctly with the sensuous art of music or not, poetry has
changed laws, opinions, and governments by risking all to speak truth.
However, if done cohesively with music, text
elevates and inspires while provoking. This way, it reaches many people who
could use a lift or those who need shaking.
ML: Some
music styles can be fads, but the blues and jazz is always with us. Why do
think that is?
HG: Blues and jazz and their descendent, rock
and roll, are the only uniquely American art forms because of the African
American culture that produced it. Blues music is honest and raw speaking in
charming ways about the basic compulsions and travail all humans share, and this
feature alone could make it of lasting importance. In addition, it represents a
period in history and culture when slaves maintained spirit and identity
through art. Blues music is basic, honest, entertaining, and discusses
universal themes elevating real loss and pain to art. Art makes reality
bearable and often beautiful.
On the other hand, jazz is our classical music
with the same level of complication, highly evolved musical skills, and
universal appeal. It is timeless and must be admired just like classical music
is for the same reasons. However, it is culturally different because of the
African roots in jazz, something it has in common with the Blues. Both
originated in the segregated South and were originally played for African
American audiences, a music dense with pleasure and life experience. It
developed outside the mainstream so was eccentric and unique taking many
chances the proper social mores and tastes of the majority society at the time
censored and mitigated.
Once it did cross the color barrier, both forms,
blues and jazz, continue to be cherished and imitated with a provenance that is
full of the history and mystery of the South and the dark plague of slavery.
Jazz has the high intellectualism and spirituality of our best timeless performance
forms, such as opera, but its African American origins immortalize the triumphs
of spirit and culture unlike anything that came before it or
since.
ML: What
first attracted you to the music and poetry? How has the music and poetry
changed your life?
HG: I always admired the way Richard Harris
spoke-sang his role in the 1967 film Camelot. I was around 17 and wanted to be
a folk singer playing the basements and other hip haunts in Princeton and New
York. Even though I sang in the church choir during most of my childhood at St.
Hedwig’s Grammar School and Church in Trenton, New Jersey, I really did not
have much of a singing voice, so I admired Harris’s ability to fake sing.
The second major trigger was a reel-to-reel tape
of Dylan Thomas reading his poems with so much vocal dynamism and expression
that his voice was singing in a Welsh bard way. Let me go back in time here. I
was on my own for the first time in a third-floor walkup near the train station
and reinventing myself as the artist I would later become. I always wrote and
put together hand-made books of illustrated poetry in that first apartment
while attending art school and working as a graphic artist at JZ Art Service. I
had talents in painting, drawing, writing, and drama since childhood, but the
standard forms of each were boring. To practice them, I had to invent new ways
to create; ways that could keep me entertained and interested enough to invest
so much effort and emotional energy.
A multitude of memories in my angst-ridden life
were severely dominated by the compulsion to join together my disparate talents
in visual and high art, desire to perform with a band, and to write or, more
accurately, make poetry. Destiny dealt me this hand, and I felt a spiritual
pressure to succeed using Destiny’s cards. Enrolling in the radical progressive
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design freed me from the literal interpretation
of visual art practices since they almost abolished the painting department at
that time in 1974, so powerful was the momentum toward performance as well as
conceptual and media art. After Emmett Williams, who started a
performance-oriented avant-garde art movement of the 1960s called Fluxus, performed his poetry as a guest at NSCAD, I was
hooked. Vito Acconci, a NSCAD graduate, also was what
I call an existential poet conflated onto performance art, which is more
sculptural than performance poetry, which is more textual. This defines a huge
distinction between the two.
When Allen started recording albums of his
readings with live music in the background, it showed me that recordings of
poetry and music could work. I could be a fake singer. All of the poets who
used music occasionally did so at poetry readings to promote their books. Their
music and poetry never cohered because poets did not allow space for the music,
and musicians were not familiar enough with the text or did not have the ears
for it. The only other poet with band I heard who made it cohere was Michael
McClure in the late 1980s. McClure writes drama so is theatrical and knows how
to use copious amounts of dramatic pause. If I were to give a piece of advice
to performance poets who want to work with a band or musicians, it would be
that dramatic vocal pauses and vocal extensions are needed to make poetry and music
cohere.
I was already into performance art and media art
eschewing supremely boring printed poetry and wrote to produce what I began
calling poetry for voices during the 1970s. I had improvised with experimental
and professional musicians in the past. When I met musician and composer D’Jalma in 1978, we started collaborating immediately with
our skills. I wrote poetry only for the band we formed and not for the printed
page. These are two different animals. Our results received much support of all
kinds of disciplines because we produced pieces that cohered. The composition,
music, spoken vocals, and text became an aural film with all the pieces
supporting and enhancing each other in tone, timing, and dynamics—a rarity for
music and poetry even now. It was my primary form, like performance art can be
for visual artists, which is why I named it performance poetry—to distinguish
what East of Eden Band did from other poets’ half-hearted attempts at adding
music to their stodgy poetry readings.
Inventing and succeeding at something new
creates a hallmark in a person’s life, as did performance poetry in
collaboration with D’Jalma Garnier.
We clicked in all sorts of ways. The results created a legacy for this living
new form, the new spoken word poets and slammers coming up today who take
performance of poetic text as seriously as I do. It is more than writing well
and reading well. It is performance and theater as well as writing poetry for
performance. The two are extremely difficult to do well together since the
printed cannon can’t be ignored even as new elements, like music, are explored
and used.
HG: Blues fits my melancholy and angst-ridden
nature, so much so that I moved to the Mississippi River Delta where I met dear
Babe Stovall and others. I drank many bottles of MD 20/20 wine with them in
pool halls and 24-hour bars where they played for tips. MD stands for Mad Dog,
a sweetish cheap red wine, but they don’t make that anymore. Delta blues was my
favorite with its homespun tropes about sex: I had a coal black mare; my how
that horse could run.
Blues showed me an alternative to the Catholic
views on sex I was raised with and helped me to explore free love and hedonism.
Blues music illustrates how art transforms sorrow to joy and satisfaction.
Blues is an affirmation of life while acknowledging and empathizing with the
living conditions caused by poverty.
What
experiences in your life make you a GOOD POET?
HG: All of the struggles with being different
and misunderstood at my family home translate into poetry: beatings,
disrespect, constant harassment about my desires, actions, and opinions, and
the resulting loneliness. There aren’t only a few experiences that create a
good poet. I was born to be a poet, but without making it my number priority in
life from a young age, it would have been wasted. Consequently, I lived a risky
and experimental life to support my birthright while staying away from anything
that did not fulfill my supra ambition for wisdom and arty expression,
including having children and a bourgeois life. Thus, my life has been
materially spare yet does not feel that way at all. It feels as rich as my
cultural and creative life because art infuses true wealth upon us. Making good
art takes complete dedication and sacrifice.
ML: How do
you describe Hedwig Gorski’s poetry and philosophy?
HG: Understanding trumps hate every time. Real
poetry communicates what is hidden, what we and others
try to keep out of view. I participate in everyone’s philosophy to some degree,
as do we all whether we want to or not. My philosophy is that all ideas are
fair play for examination and analysis. I never met an idea that was not made
more interesting with exposition and rebuttal, and good poets are fearless
living in uncommon comfort amongst all opposing views. Further, we who control
ideas manipulating language to suit our purposes need opposition as well as
support.
My philosophy of art embraces the future and
technology without fear knowing the momentum of humanism increases the longer
it travels. My humanity is the legacy I inherited from human predecessors, and
the American Republican Party platform that we are on our and should remain
victims of our birth circumstances is anathema.
I’m a Utopian and animal lover who wants to
solve the world’s problems through art. I love people idealistically in mass,
which in Polish is ludzi or The People. Individual and personal
love becomes more exclusionary. Most intellectuals and philosophers
prioritize similarly. I want my poetry and writing to be probative and
unflinching so we can all attain a humanist Utopia.
ML: From
whom have you have learned the most secrets about the poetry and music?
HG: Without doubt, the Beats are my greatest
influence in poetry. I had the pleasure of hanging out with them after an
initial excitement about Kerouac’s prose and Ferlinghetti’s
poems, to start, at age twenty. They were compassionate and inclusive (except
maybe for women the feminist in me might whine), and became fascinated with the
darker layers of society as well as Zen practices to elevate the outer
parameters of light in balance with the dark.
In music, besides blues singers, conceptual
minimalist John Cage reveals context and theory are as important as musical
composition, increasing the intellectual component of music compared to
sensory/emotional. The world of conceptual ideas is a comfortable domain for my
poems. During the early 1970s, I wanted to eliminate materiality from art
objects to convey meaning, a complete mind-to-mind transmission of pure arts,
something like dance but with mind waves. The closest I came to that is using
text.
Patti Smith almost did what I did but she sings,
mainly, and did it in pop rock culture while I accomplished alternatively. Her
gender bending appearance is very seductive. I went to a reading where she was accompanied by Lenny Kaye, her band guitarist, in New York.
I forget where, but it was one of those iconic places like the Village Gate. Her
reading was ponderous and provocative. She interacted with the audience in the
same way Joy Cole did, as if the text was secondary to presence in shared
space. I call that existential poetry.
Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor
Theatre actors exude the physical presence of their bodies and beings
challenging the audience with the power of their souls as well as their bodies
on exhibition. This is theatrical presence and what I call existential poetry
performance, which is something Joy Cole did best of anyone I knew.
I learned the biggest secrets from performing
poetry and music together as a primary instead of a secondary or tertiary
activity. A band allows for each individual to meld into a simultaneous giant
great thing. So, the influences of the theories and performances mentioned here
come to mind as having revealed secrets for my art in a broad way. My own
practice taught me to listen and respond with every aspect of my being
regardless of the consequences, positive or negative, which are secrets from my
art in specific ways.
ML: What
is the “feeling” you miss most nowadays from Babe Stovall and New Orleans?
Freedom. Babe Stovall played almost daily in
Jackson Square for tips as tourists passed starting about noon. He used to
pitch tourists this way between songs: “Put in a quarter or a dollar. I even
take food stamps ‘cause I likes to eat.” I’d ride my bike under the hot
Gulf sun to K & B Drugs on Esplanade for a fish burger and coffee, then to
Jackson Square where I would sit with Babe drinking MD 20/20 until nightfall.
He would go to “the chicken place” for dinner and sometimes we’d continue to
the Seven Seas bar where he’d play for tips and drinks. A pleasant state of
tipsiness kept us mellow. So the feeling was not intense at all, but free and
mellow.
Speaking of intense, though, let me tell you a
story about a guy at the Seven Seas who came over to us at the bar one night.
He was in his thirties, a black guy, who kept asking why I hung around with
Babe. He broke a bottle and pointed the broken shard end at my throat. I don’t
know if he expected me to start screaming, but I did not react at all sensing
he was a paper tiger. Unfortunately, when I walked home later that night from
the Quarter up Esplanade to my rented room at N. Miro,
the man appeared and followed me. He caught up and started a conversation as if
he did not know what to make of me and my care-free
mellow nature. His confusion became threatening because it seemed he wanted
something from me but he was not sure what it was. I rang the doorbell of Tom Natkin, a jazz keyboardist, who thankfully buzzed me in
when he saw the man standing behind me through his glass front door. Living
freely has its risks, and the so-called Big Easy can kill those who get too
mellow in a variety of ways.
ML: Tell
me a few things about your meet with Babe Stovall, which memory from him makes
you smile?
HG: One sunny day, I rode my bike down Esplanade
Avenue to Jackson Square near the Mississippi River side of the Quarter across
from Café du Monde and stopped to listen to Babe sing and play his steel faced
guitar. Actually, the entire guitar was metal and acoustic hollow bodied. He
sat on a park bench with his guitar case open, and he would put that guitar
behind his head to play without missing a note or lyric. Stevie Ray Vaughn
copied that move. Babe was old and lost a few chops, but tourists were
enthralled. I sat on the park bench when a spot presented itself, and Babe
passed the bottle of MD 20/20 wine to me. I loved being there and listening to
his music and banter. What a way to spend a sunny afternoon in New Orleans it
was. We became friends and casual companions for a time.
One day, a young hippie mandolin player who sat
in with Babe at Jackson Square convinced us we could drive up to visit
Roosevelt Holts in Mississippi in his station wagon. It was a dry county in a
small town with shacks on stilts along orange dirt roads. Roosevelt’s shack was
about 500 square feet. His electric guitar and amplifier were in his bedroom,
and he moved these out to the living room for a jam. Neighbors stood outside in
the orange dirt to enjoy the music. Babe had a fifth of whisky in his back
pocket. After a while, he was tipsy and I walked with him to the corner store
where he bought a couple of pickled eggs to eat. The white woman store owner must have phoned the sheriff when she saw the
fifth in Babe’s back pocket because the sheriff stopped us on the walk back and
arrested Babe. It was a dry county in Mississippi meaning no booze was allowed.
The mandolin player, his girlfriend, and I piled
into Roosevelt’s Cadillac and drove to the jail to bail him out. I will always
remember Babe’s meek look when he stood behind bars while Roosevelt made some
sort of deal with the sheriff promising to keep these New Orleans folks in line
with Mississippi standards for sobriety. The sheepish and apologetic look on
Babe’s face behind bars when we went to bail him out charmed us all and remains
an image I will always recall about him with fondness and warmth.
ML: Which
is the most interesting period in your life and why?
HG: It would be easier to pinpoint the least
interesting period in my life because I made it a point to live an unusually
interesting life as an artist and bohemian. This I accomplished with immense
success and continue today.
My least interesting times were Sundays at my
parents’ home on Indiana Avenue in Trenton, NJ, where I felt misunderstood and
restricted like so many growing up in the 1950s. I could not wait until Mondays
to return to my Catholic schools, first St. Hedwig’s and then Notre Dame High
School, where I found liberation and fun as well as new knowledge. It may sound
peculiar that Catholic schools were less restrictive than my parents’ home, but
I loved school and most teachers, even nuns, appreciated my talents and
nurtured my intelligence. I easily forgive every transgression from my Slavic
peasant immigrant parents saddled with an artistic brooding child like me
because they sent us to parochial schools throughout, which I loved so dearly.
I hope they forgave me the intolerable explorations of entitled Americanism I
forced upon our home culture.
ML: What
advice would you give to aspiring musicians thinking of pursuing a career in
the craft?
HG: To young musicians or older ones embarking
on a career, you will need to dedicate your life to mastering the craft by
making everything else second to it. After mastering the craft, keep yourself
excited, most of all, with creative innovation and risk. It is important to
surround yourself with other professional or aspiring musicians and artists who
also place their art, craft, and career first above all other things.
Everything in your life should support your dedication to music and making it a
career.
ML: Are
there any memories from with East of Eden Band, which you’d like to share with
us?
HG: I recall one performance with an alternate
version of East of Eden Band called “early breakfast with Hedwig Gorski” in Austin where venerable South American poet
Cecilia Bustamante was in the audience. Townes van Zandt’s
sax player, Donnie Silverman, played with us, and Jacob Dylan
and members of his band during his woodshedding
period in Austin were in the audience, too. The venue’s stage, an art
house, was floor level and it was like the audience was on stage with the band,
which excited me very much, so I turned out a very physical performance
inspired by their attention and appreciation. I felt out of control
which embarrasses the intellectual in me but works well for performance.
When you lose yourself in the moment, the soul’s existence becomes palpable—the
soul comes to the forefront. I see slammers using their bodies and voices in
predictable and imitative ways to add theatricality to the text, but without an
abandon toward risk in performance, it can come across like brittle old pages.
Performance should be unpredictable and metaphysical as well as unique.
ML: Do you
know why the music and poetry are connected to the avant-garde & what
characterize the sound of poetry?
HG: Allen Ginsberg preached how “breath”
controls the sound of poetry after he became a Buddhist, so that is one easy
way to characterize the sound of poetry. However, with music, spaces control
the sound or meter of free verse in a similar way to how word accents/emphasis,
such as iambic pentameter, controlled the beat of older poetry. When I work
with musicians, we all have to stay on beat which requires me to pronounce
words like singers with elongated syllables or spaces and silence that
accommodate synchronization with the music. These are not easy to chart, so
listening by musicians and poets working together is crucial for success. So
poetry is the unnatural yet super-real sound of words, to answer your last
question first.
Music and poetry together is ancient, and you
being Greek know that. What makes my performance
poetry avant-garde in the 1970s and 80s is the combination of pop culture
influences (Warhol), feminist attitudes, and most importantly, my rejection of
print poetry, which surpassed ancient oral poetry. While most poets
superimposed poems on music, or vice-versa, during readings of their print
poems, usually with largely unsuccessful results, none dedicated themselves to
write exclusively for oral performance with music marrying the spoken text to a
musical composition the way singer-songwriters do. I was in the forefront of
the spoken word movement that followed me in the late 1980s making my work with
poetry and music avant-garde. Spoken worders write
poems for oral performance, not for print publications or mere reading in
public putting theater first, and I did that first starting in the late 1970s.
My artistic leap was logical to me in a musician’s town like Austin.
Performance poetry led to slam and the spoken word movement where poets wrote
for clubs and the stage, the ear in a primary and real sense instead of a
forced metaphorical way counting out syllables and forcing rhymes silently. Old
rhyming patterns are redundant for print poetry since the metrics and rhyme
originated to help ancient bards memorize and remember their long oral poems.
Free verse makes more sense for page silent print poems. Being first to start a
radical artistic trend that evolves and lasts makes it avant-garde, I suppose.
Finally, when I started in the late 1970s, it
was a challenge to translate poems written for performance for the printed
page. When publishers asked to print my performance poems, I used to get
reactions like “I don’t understand your line breaks.” I wasn’t concerned with
line breaks or other visual textual matters when writing. I wrote in line units
for the oral voice and the need to breathe while speaking instead of writing in
stanzas for print. If you understand that aesthetic choices while writing oral
poetry differ greatly from aesthetic choices when writing for the page, you
gain an insight into why my performance poetry, my poetry and music, is
avant-garde. Today, publishers and readers have become accustomed to reading
the unusual forms spoken word takes on the page since the culture has caught up
with me.
Being an avant-gardist,
an innovator, is difficult for at least two reasons: first, it takes 5 to 30
years for the culture at-large to catch up and appreciate or understand what
I’m doing; second, the systems that support the innovation have to be adapted,
borrowed, or educated to get it out to the public since the establishment
system for literature is not set up or prepared, of course, for avant-garde
work dealing with form.
ML: Are
there any memories from Bob Dylan and Václav Havel,
which you’d like to share with us?
HG: The Dylan concert in Prague where I had the
privilege of meeting Mr. Havel backstage was unique because the audience
continually took photos and videos of the concert. Flashes went off throughout
the audience continually, and this is forbidden at his concerts in the U. S.
When I kissed Bob on the cheek after the concert during the line-up before he
left for the tour bus, he thanked me for the kiss like a 19th century cowboy.
Deep down, I think Bob sees himself as the guy tipping his cowboy hat on the
album cover for Nashville Skyline. He really does see himself as a working and
touring musician more so than an icon or celebrity.
What a privilege it was to meet Václav Havel, the Nelson Mandela of Czech Republic, and an
honoree of the Fulbright Foundation in the United States, because he is an
artist diplomat who became president of his nation after being jailed and
tortured. He acted first and foremost like an artist, an unassuming lovable
fellow who wrote piercing satirical plays fearlessly. He and Bob are the same height
and have the same sort of unassuming dispositions and mischievous smiles--both
smokers and artist dissidents. It was a shame to lose Mr. Havel in 2011 while
he was still vital. To inform those of your readers who are not familiar with
Havel, he was President of Czechoslovakia (1989-92) and President of the Czech
Republic (1993-2003) as well as an author and playwright. He was one of
the principal authors of the human rights manifesto Charter 77, and remained an
important voice in global affairs until his death in 2011” (Project Syndicate /
Vaclav Havel).
ML: If you
go back to the past what things you would do better and what things you would a
void to do again?
HG: One negotiation for a record deal on the
west coast which I should have seized but let slip through my
fingers is something I regret. I wasn’t prepared for the business end of
recording and record production.
Also, I wish I could get back most of the time
wasted on some of those youthful low-life ways in the past that helped me
overcome the demoralizing insecurities I developed during childhood; yet and
still, it was good therapy to recover from the abuse. I enjoyed the looseness
and experimentation proffered by my contemporaries through the Hippie culture
and postmodern art. While those nomadic experiences drifting in search of
myself sophisticated and educated me in special ways, I keep thinking that I
could have accomplished more if I had been more stable. Too much of my nomadic
life was spent trying to avoid going over the insanity cliff; nevertheless,
artistic experimentation and poetic sensitivity inevitably forces practitioners
to far edges of life anyway. I suppose I should be grateful for getting a head
start toward brinksmanship with an uncommon, troubled childhood.
ML: Why
did you think that the Beats, and avant-garde artists continued to generate
such a devoted following?
HG: Beats became an alternative voice to
Academics and Modernists in the postwar society that questioned Humanism. The
universities were dominated by conservative views at that time, and liberal
thinkers, activists, and inclusive writers did not feel comfortable there. The
Beats established an alternative literary culture with observations that opened
up society to underclasses and gave access to poetry
for those who were previously disenfranchised. They looked outward and spoke
with colloquial passion in ways anyone could understand, part of the postmodern
momentum toward egalitarianism in practice. Their new approaches harkened to
the Romanticist and Humanist topics in Whitman and Williams, yet they
translated these topics to expose the hypocrisy in the 1950s American divisive
society. They used the iconic images of America, like Robert Frank’s
photographs also did, to expose honestly the vulnerable core of ourselves while not fearing the establishment that often
prosecuted them for obscenity for their works. Robert Frank produced the
experimental Beat film, Pull My Daisy,
in 1959, a playful verité improvisation featuring the
Beats. Due to the courts prosecuting Beat literature on obscenity charges, the
courts were forced to ultimately endorse radical Beat literature as legitimate
works of art with redeeming social and cultural value--in a way, usurping the
boycott of Beat literature by conservative Academia. Ginsberg’s Howl in 1957 and later Michael McClure’s
play The Beard during Hippie
free-love 1966, went on to win an official imprimatur from the court trials as
art with redeeming social/cultural value, by definition, during proceedings
that tried to label them pornography.
On a more superficial level, the Beats were
exciting characters with provocative literature. They exploited the American
constitutional rights of freedom, to speak and express whatever they wanted and
to travel the network of highways in our iconic machine, the car. They offered
an exciting lifestyle alternative that fit younger generations who rightfully
questioned the integrity of existing institutions that practiced racism and
other forms of discrimination and privilege.
Finally, few realize how much Allen was a master
of promotion. He ran for president during the Hippie period, and the notoriety
revived his lagging career at the time. He also advocated for the works of his
colleagues, including Jack Kerouac’s On
the Road, creating a context for his own writing resulting in a movement.
Passion is a powerful force when joined with artistry, and the Beats had a
wonderful brand and product, and like Andy Warhol, knew how to bring it to the
attention of the public.
Avant-gardists are the first ones to launch a new culture that
everyone else wants to participate in, so they imitate it, but they have just
as much fun imitating since it is new to them. Society is always intrigued with
the new and grateful for it.
ML: What
is your “secret” DREAM and what is your nightmare? Happiness is...
HG: My most secret dream is to receive the Noble
Prize. One nightmare I have is society going backwards to social mores of the
1950s. It did not ever feel right even when I was a child growing up in that
conservative and hypocritical world.
As for happiness, read my poem about the matter “There’s
Always Something to Make You Happy.”
ML: Which
of historical personalities would you like to meet? How you would spend a day
with Mayakovsky?
HG: Historical personalities I would like to
meet include Socrates for conversation, Sappho, Billie Holliday, and Bessie
Smith.
Mayakovsky’s birth date is July 19 and mine July 18, and my
mother is also Ukrainian like his. I empathize with the idealism of early
Socialist notions and the disillusion of Stalin’s regime for communist Russia.
I feel a deep connection to his politicized and futurist aesthetics,
compassion, personal stoicism, and social empathy, especially for rural
populations and the working class.
In answer to your question, I had to think if I
would spend the day in his time period or mine, and his won out with the bright
future Bolsheviks offered Russian peasants and workers at that time. We could
have fun drinking coffee and vodka in the morning, maybe with a little pickled
herring, take a walk around Moscow, read new and unpublished works to each
other, plan a media project or play we could write together, ride around to
rubble city places on a whim, converse with discarded people we find there, and
take photographs. We might make love if I were in my early twenties during this
hypothetical day, then go to the baths for a steam. Later, at dusk—it would be
late fall and light snow would brighten the evening--we’d discuss art, poetry,
and politics with his contemporaries at the Black Dog Café, where we could
improvise a poetry duet for the audience, with everyone in the place beating on
tables or cups to keep time. Finally, bleary-eyed and tired, we might commit
suicide together but fail at that to live another day contemporaneously,
possibly in New York this time.
ML: What
would you say to Warhol and Pound? What would you like to ask Jack Kerouac, Corso and Ginsberg?
HG: Well, I did speak to Andy Warhol once
briefly in New York, and he gave me the evil eye and walked away, so what I
said did not go over very well at all. I was a young art student/painter at the
time and wanted his semen on a bride painting, a twisted blank gauze canvas
stretched on both sides with a sensuous slit on one side creating a 1.5 “ vulva
space between the two layers, perfect for the amorphic
tone-on-tone stain I envisioned. I asked avant-gardist
Charlemagne Palestine and a few others—none agreed. Even though the painting
remained a virgin, responses I received from male artists created a process art
piece that surpassed the object at the center of it.
With Pound, I would have to ask what about the
Nazis compelled his support since my family suffered terribly first-hand due to
the Nazi invasions in Eastern/Central Europe. This disjunction between
idealization by intellectuals like Pound and the practice of Fascism, for
example, is probably why Plato did not trust poets.
Assuming that your hypothetical scenario would
allow me to ask whatever I wanted and would receive an answer, I’d ask Kerouac
who his favorite woman writer is. I spent an evening or two with Gregory, and
he seemed to be looking for the maternal in women like other brooding boys and
men in the arts I knew. We talked about different things, but nothing too deep
since he had a role for me in his mind based on my gender—a disappointingly
typical old-guy response for his generation at the time.
With Allen, well, I never asked him why he gave
me the thumbs down early during a reading I did at the Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics Conference in the Naropa Great
Hall during the 1980s. Like a Roman emperor’s thumbs
down, it signaled to the rest of the audience that reading from my avant-garde
verse drama Booby, Mama! was not to be supported and
applauded. And, I lost that audience due to Ginsberg’s rudeness to his young
guest reader in her early thirties. Later, even when I drove him around Austin
in the car alone or when he practiced for a show at Liberty Lunch in our garage
apartment in Hyde Park, I did not want to sound whiney about it, so never
asked. There was a lot of slam-like competitive jostling on stage amongst the
core Beats, who were also close friends, and my kind supposition about his
blatant rejection assumed they wanted to toughen up the youngsters coming up. Gentle
Peter Orlovsky apologized for Allen’s rudeness
afterwards. I expected more recognition for the quality of my work then and
now, but it is always rough for avant-gardists
waiting ten to twenty years for the audience to fully catch up. Allen wrote
stunning blurbs for male poets whose poems I did not especially like. He
was a bit of a whore, really, and was not beyond using poetry to get laid. His
disinterest in women made feminist sexual bluntness in poetry an affront, I
imagine.
[“Hedwig
Gorski: Rhymes and Rhythms of Eden,” interview by
Michael Limnios, was originally published in Blues
GR: Keep The Blues Alive,
http://blues.gr/profiles/blogs/an-interview-with-hedwig-gorski-a-performance-poet-and-avant,
2013. Used by permission.]