Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street

by Hedwig Gorski

Hedwig Gorski's memoir and archive of her pivotal 1978 avant-garde literary performance. Cover photo is by award- winning photographer, Lauren Piperno. Contains the full script for experimental verse drama "Booby, Mama!" and portions of Joy Cole's epistolary journal of the troupe and times in "Letter to Krystal," an intimate letter to her daughter. The conceptual art process behind Hedwig Gorskis 1978 avant-garde literary art Booby, Mama!, seems impossible to pull off. There was no money, and it used found text and street actors who were drunk, stoned, or filled with existential angst living on the fringes of society. The troupe members spent spring and summer in an abandoned house on Powell Street near Spellmans Bar, a local hamburger joint where Lucinda Williams and other gravel-road stars performed. Joy Cole, embodying the performance poems character Red Light, became artistic soul-mate, nemesis, and, eventually, Gorskis dearest departed friend. Portions of inebriated Coles epistolary journal document with candor and compassion how such mythic creations materialize and survive. Images by award-winning photographer, Lauren Piperno, letters, and other texts complete a performance artwork that stunned even the infamous world-weary bohemians and individualists engaged with Austins anything-goes Romantic Period. Altogether, it paints an atmospheric landscape of the town that summoned and intoxicated so many beloved dreamers and artists of the time toward intense self-actualization.

132 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Hedwig Gorski · Rating 5 out of 5]

If society is stifling and prescribed for you, go back to 1978 Austin, Texas, when it was a rather sleepy college town with an influx of newcomers with a creative surge. Women avant-garde leaders, as Alan Clinton points out in his review for _Reconstruction_. Intoxication in the title refers to physical and spiritual drunkeness of the type Baudelaire encouraged, but really funky and homemade by the woman poet who invented the terminology for performance poetry, Hedwig Gorski. These were the days before she became a PhD in Creative Writing, free as the wind and a head full of invention after leaving art school, the radical Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Her cohort and the "star" of Gorski's cut-up "neo-verse drama" titled _Booby, Mama!_, Joy Cole, a legend in her own mind, elevated her atrocious drunken behavior while with Gorski's troupe "guerilla theater." The book documents these firsts by two women avant-gardists in the unlikely sleepy capital of Texas and how Gorski helped to wake things up. "Become intoxicated with life and creative spontaneity again," says Hedwig Gorski. "Let's be in it again."

Read Alan Clinton's review in Reconstruction
http://reconstruction.eserver.org/073...
online journal of cultural studies

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