Hazel Smith is a poet, performer, new media artist, musician, and scholar whose work has moved across experimental poetry, sound, performance, electronic literature, and intermedia practice for more than four decades. She is Emeritus Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University and a founding member of the sound and multimedia ensemble austraLYSIS.
Her poetry collections include Abstractly Represented, Keys Round Her Tongue, The Erotics of Geography, Word Migrants, and Ecliptical. Her critical books include The Writing Experiment and The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship.
Hazel Smith in Shampoo
Shampoo published Smith in Issues 9 and 12. Issue 9 presents Writing Styles, a compact poetics built from a sequence of adverbs and verbs that turn composition into mapping, excavation, sound, movement, and combination. Issue 12 follows with The decision, whose invented compounds compress hesitation, desire, certainty, and uncertainty into the texture of the words themselves.
These appearances place Smith within Shampoo’s archive of contemporary poets and connect her work with the magazine’s wider field of experimental poetry.
Writing Styles
Writing Styles moves through “arbitrarily,” “systematically,” “tentatively,” “inclusively,” “eclectically,” “obsessively,” “firmly,” and “fearlessly.” Each sentence proposes a different mode of writing: words are thrown down, signs excavated, strangers drawn in, media overlapped, sounds bent, and metaphors left untied.
The poem condenses several concerns that recur throughout Smith’s career: linguistic recombination, unstable signs, porous boundaries between media, and the productive tension between structure and improvisation.
The decision
The decision turns choice into a field of verbal invention. Compound forms such as “want-stalling,” “mirror-maps,” and “know-unknow” keep opposing impulses active inside a single phrase. The difficulty of deciding is carried by the morphology of the poem.
Sound, performance, and intermedia
Smith’s work has long treated poetry as a meeting point for text, voice, music, image, and digital form. Her career as a professional violinist preceded and informed her later work in sound poetry and multimedia performance. Through austraLYSIS and other collaborations, she has developed pieces in which language operates as part of a larger acoustic and visual field.
This intermedia practice gives Smith a distinctive place within contemporary modern poetry and electronic literature. Her work repeatedly tests how a poem changes when voice, sound, image, code, and page are allowed to interact.
Word Migrants and Ecliptical
Word Migrants brings together political and social pressures including migration, oppressive regimes, climate change, death, dementia, abuse, disability, and childlessness while using sampling, quotation, surreal conjunction, and techniques drawn from music and new media.
Ecliptical, published in 2022, extends Smith’s commitment to linguistic and generic experiment. In later interviews she has described poetry as a form that can sustain ambiguity, surprise, humor, immersion, and multiple possible readings.
Further reading
Western Sydney University provides Smith’s current academic and creative profile. Giramondo documents Word Migrants, and Cordite Poetry Review offers an extended interview on her poetics and Ecliptical.