Lydia Tomkiw

In 2020 all of Tomkiw's poetry was re-issued as Lydia Tomkiw Poems, by Universal Exports of North America. This collection presents all of her publications in facsimile editions, and gathers together more than 180 uncollected poems, accounting for all her Algebra Suicide releases as well as Incorporated, her final solo work. It features an introduction by Paul Hoover, a recollection by Sharon Mesmer, and a consideration of Algebra Suicide by music critic/Trouser Press editor Ira Robbins.

In 2019 they released Still Life a 16 track compilation that collects the 9 remaining songs from Big Skin, 3 songs from The Secret Like Crazy, and 4 songs from various compilations.

In 2013 Dark Entries Records issued Feminine Squared, an 18 track compilation that collects all 8 songs from the first two EPs, 4 songs from the Big Skin cassette, 4 songs from "The Secret Like Crazy", a song from the Pas De Deux compilation, and a previously unreleased song.

In 2004, after a period of aimlessness, false starts & dissipation, Tomkiw's widowed mother asked her daughter to join her in Sun City, Arizona, where she now lived. Her years in Arizona were troubled and chaotic, the details and particulars largely lost, and Tomkiw and her work faded from view. In September 2007, at age forty-eight, she died of natural causes in her apartment in Phoenix. She was laid to rest in the mausoleum at the Saint Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cemetery in Chicago.

But something was very wrong. Never a band calibrated to mass tastes, Algebra Suicide found appreciation fickle. And Tomkiw's inattention to cultivating her place in the contemporary poetry scene left her loosely rooted and poorly established. Tomkiw became frustrated and resentful and as things began to unravel, she began to drink, heavily. Tensions between Hedeker and Tomkiw quickly escalated and in February 1993, the couple separated. Amidst the disintegration of their marriage and band, they recorded their last, and arguably finest record, Tongue Wrestling. That summer, Hedeker and Tomkiw finally divorced and Algebra Suicide was definitively over.

In the summer of 1993, Tomkiw began work on setting a new group of poems to music. She retained the same basic template as Algebra Suicide, but employed various collaborators and producers, including members of Sosumi, Reality Scare, Martin Bowes of Attrition, and Edward Ka-Spel of the Legendary Pink Dots. The resulting record, Incorporated, while not far removed from her work in Algebra Suicide, broadened the sonic palette in interesting ways, inflecting her poetic delivery with fresh industrial, techno, and ambient touches. Tomkiw bid farewell to Chicago with a 1994 show at the Lounge Ax, focused exclusively on the material from Incorporated. Immediately after, Tomkiw moved to New York City.

Spooked and uncertain, the couple returned stateside and resumed work on their third record. Algebra Suicide held a live show at Club Lower Links with a contest to name it; the winning name, Swoon, was contributed by the club's doorman. Swoon was expanded into a double album on CD with the addition of the prior, European only, album Alpha Cue. The record was released in 1992 in the US by Widely Distributed Records and in Europe by Body Records. The band returned to New York that summer for the 1992 New Music Seminar and Tomkiw participated in a reading curated by Richard Hell at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church.

In 1989, Algebra Suicide received a Chicago Artists Abroad Grant to perform overseas in Europe in the fall of 1990. Tomkiw and Hedeker booked a tour that took them through Munich, Cologne, Paris, Bordeaux, Louvain, and Zurich. The tour was a huge success. Preceded by strong reviews and advance buzz, the shows were packed, audiences rapt and appreciative. In May 1991, Tomkiw got another Chicago Artists Abroad Grant, this time supporting her endeavors as a traditional poet. She flew to London to join Stannard, Hattersley, and Paul Violi on a short reading tour of the UK. In November 1991, Tomkiw booked a return tour of Europe for Algebra Suicide with stops in Paris, Bordeaux, Nancy, Cologne, and Berlin. But this tour was markedly different. Audiences were sparer, the press less attentive.

The Best American Poetry 1988, New American Writing, Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry Since 1974, joe soap's canoe, Unbearables Anthology, Aerial, Brooklyn Review, B-City, The Santa Monica Review, Thunder Egg, Hair Trigger, The Wormwood Review

In 1987, the band released The Secret Like Crazy on the Massachusetts-based label RRRecords and in Europe on the West German Dom Elchklang imprint, essentially becoming Algebra Suicide's international debut. Shortly after, another German label, Pursuit of Market Share, released a live recording from a performance at Chicago's Links Hall entitled Real Numbers.

Meanwhile, Tomkiw's written poetry got a sudden boost when her palindromic poem "Six of Ox Is" was included in 1987's New American Writing, an annual anthology emphasizing contemporary American poetry. That led, a year later, to the poem's inclusion in the first volume of The Best American Poetry, founded by poet and editor David Lehman who tapped John Ashbery as its inaugural editor.

Algebra Suicide began booking performances beyond the Chicago circuit, playing in Milwaukee, Lexington, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, with favorable reviews accumulating in alternative magazines like Trouser Press and Option. Tomkiw continued to write prolifically, but chapbooks yielded to records and singles, and by 1986, Algebra Suicide had become the primary vehicle for publishing her poetry.

In 1985, Algebra Suicide released their debut album, Big Skin, on the label Cause and Effect. Its format represented the firmly dual nature of Algebra Suicide — a cassette of thirteen songs paired with a chapbook presenting thirteen poems in the same running order.

Tomkiw and Hedeker spent the better part of that year developing and recording new work. Shows were infrequent; they viewed performances much more as special events than as part of a regular gigging schedule. In 1984, Algebra Suicide released its second EP, An Explanation for That Flock of Crows.

In the fall of 1982, at a reading at Columbia Squires, Hedeker publicly accompanied Tomkiw's poetry for the first time. It was a rudimentary setup, with Hedeker providing minimally amplified washes of sound on a somewhat glitchy Vox Guitar Organ. This experiment soon coalesced into an actual band. Their name, Algebra Suicide, came from a line in the poem "Recalling the Last Encounter." It was, from the very beginning, envisioned as a vehicle for Tomkiw's poetry; Hedeker's intention was to bring interesting accents and color to the poems themselves.

Tomkiw and Hedeker formed the label, Buzzerama Records, and in the winter of 1982 released their first 7" EP True Romance At The World's Fair. Algebra Suicide's first public performance was Labor Day evening 1983 at the West End Club. The song "True Romance at the World's Fair" was selected by the New York-based new wave magazine Trouser Press for inclusion on its trailblazing 1983 compilation, The Best of America Underground.

In April 1980, Tomkiw and Sharon Mesmer, by now best friends and poetic accomplices, staged their first reading at the Paul Waggoner Gallery in Chicago. Later that summer, Tomkiw went to see a band called Trouble Boys at Jamie's Elsewhere Lounge. After the show, she struck up a conversation with their guitarist, Don Hedeker. They hit it off and she invited Hedeker to come to a reading she was giving a few weeks later. Soon, Hedeker was smitten, their romance flourished, and they moved in together later that summer. On Halloween of 1981 they were married, with Mesmer as Tomkiw's maid of honor.

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.

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.

Meanwhile, one of her farflung submissions made a powerful impression on a young, precocious UK poet named Martin Stannard, who in 1978 had begun publishing a small occasional review called joe soap's canoe. In Tomkiw and her associated scene Stannard had found like-minded comrades and Tomkiw would remain entwined with joe soap's canoe for the next twelve years.

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.

Lydia Tomkiw (August 6, 1959 – September 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.

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.