Lydia Tomkiw (August 6, 1959September 4, 2007) was an American poet, singer, and songwriter, best known for her work with the new wave musical group Algebra Suicide, along with her husband Don Hedeker.
Early life
Lydia Tomkiw was born in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood in 1959, to Ukrainian immigrants Zenovia and Teodor Tomkiw. Her father worked at US Steel, her mother in a succession of retail jobs. By 1975, gang violence and crime in Humboldt Park had become untenable and the family moved to an apartment in Ukrainian Village, a vibrant hub of the émigré community. Tomkiw's creativity and aptitude secured her a spot to study art at the selective Lane Technical High School.
During these years Tomkiw wrote constantly — journaling, writing stories and poems. These proclivities alerted her early to poetry's influence and pull, and in particular, she developed an affection for the idiosyncratic Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. (Coincidentally, Hopkins would prefigure many of Tomkiw's qualities as a poet. He first set out to be a painter, turned to poetry that was characterized by striking imagery, conversational language, and formal playfulness; his sister Grace would set many of his poems to music.) But these were early, furtive forays and Tomkiw remained mainly inclined toward the visual arts.
In 1977, Tomkiw enrolled as an art major at University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, which boasted a rigorous and extremely competitive art program. Once there, however, she almost immediately found herself outclassed by other students. Her imagination often outpaced her skills, which stubbornly remained decent, but unexceptional. Tomkiw quickly grew frustrated, she began to reassess her creative practice.
Along with her art classes, Tomkiw took poetry classes taught by Maxine Chernoff, then a rising poet, fiction writer, and literary magazine editor. In Chernoff's class, Tomkiw underwent something of a conversion experience, embracing poetry as her primary vehicle of creative expression. She was particularly exhilarated by the performative possibility in poetry — she wrote to be read and she spoke to be heard. Inspired and guided by Chernoff, she quickly distinguished herself as a precocious and promising poet. In early 1978, while still a freshman, Tomkiw bundled together an early cache of poems and self-published them in a chapbook titled Ballpoint Erection. A year later, Tomkiw gathered another nineteen poems and self-published her second chapbook, Obsessions.
By the end of Tomkiw's first year at UIC, Chernoff suggested she transfer to Columbia College Chicago, a small liberal arts college with a long-standing focus on art, performance, and media. In particular, Chernoff thought Tomkiw would flourish under the tutelage of her husband, Paul Hoover, who served as poet-in-residence and taught a highly respected poetry workshop for undergraduates.
Tomkiw arrived at Columbia College in 1978 and fell in with an emerging group of predominantly female poets centered around Hoover's workshops. His first breakout student, Elaine Equi, was followed by a core group that came to include Connie Deanovich, Deborah Pintonelli, Sue Greenspan, Karen Murai, Lorri Jackson, and Sharon Mesmer.
Poetry and music
At the time, the young upstart poetry scene was socially and creatively connected to Chicago's wildly individualistic punk rock scene. A strong, midwestern practicality fortified the prevailing DIY ethos: art fueled and formed less by questions of fashion and style than the imperatives of craft and expression.
Punk and poetry also shared many of the same venues, bars, and clubs. Bars like O'Banion's, Tut's, and Lucky Number all hosted readings in between punk shows by locals like DA, Tutu and the Pirates, and Naked Raygun, and touring acts like the Dead Kennedys, TSOL, and Hüsker Dü.
Within a year, Tomkiw was firmly planted in both the punk and poetry scenes. And the experience of finding both like-minded creators, and perhaps even more importantly, a potential audience, was electrifying. Tomkiw settled into the classic boho-punk circuit, living at home, going to school, working a series of unstimulating, low-wage jobs. She lived for nightlife, wrote like a demon, haunted bookstores and record stores, and spent her thin earnings on poetry and punk rock.