Hazel Smith


The Accountants (or Brexit for Breakfast)

Should we hold a referendum on reality? There are a lot of different ways of counting votes. 

We could set off an emergency evacuation, then everyone would have to leave the world.

The backroom operators have disappeared before their time. The deals are locked in 
showrooms, until someone throws them away.  

Dubbed speech is out of synch. Teleprompters everywhere are refusing to convey what they 
are told. 

Have you heard the news about the universe? They say it refuses to remain. 

The ocean is turning into plastic, whales are being swallowed whole by sharks.

Everyone is confused about entrances and exits. Imperial perfumes have lost their fetid 
smell; royal titles their inherited sway.  

Red lines are morphing into mothballs, yellowhammers strut their dwindling prey.  

The economics of the casino, proroguing as a national sport. 

The girl with the scarred face is the only positive thinker in the room.  

 

Faking It

Lee Israel forged
the letters of literary luminaries
to boost her flagging bank balance

but the main satisfaction
was planting writing
even better than
that she parroted

is forgery creative
rather than contemptible?

authenticity types with many hands
sprouts hybrid languages

the experts (blindfold)
could not tell the Stradivarius from
the cheap contemporary model

Picasso once said 
he ‘would sign a very good forgery’
as if reproduction could summon up the real
and the self might swap places with a shade

(if I found
my violin was a fake
I would still enjoy 
playing it)

a man sometimes
forged his wife’s signature
arguing she would have penned it
had she been there

she presumably agreed to
this eclipsing intimacy

some fake pleasure
finding reward in counterfeiting
or trying to live up to
what they think
others want to hear 

some never seem to be
telling the truth
even when they are

(artificial flowers
are not the same as 
artificial intelligence)

sporting hero dopers
 may outgrow 
those who stayed spotless

—	some of my students
probably plagiarised their poems
without my discerning it —

but does a trophy shine
when dulled with fake attainment?

a friend sharing a hoax
on his Facebook page
did not realise 
it was a trick

you cannot survive in a world
where you believe
everyone is telling lies

advertisements sell
fake tablets for arthritis

didgeridoos and boomerangs
mass-produced in Bali

politicians repeat stale mantras
as experts pile on proof that
everything they said was phony

it is 1475
fake news
is big in Trento

the claim:

the Jewish community
had murdered
a two-and-a-half-year-old
Christian infant Simonino

all the Jews in the city
arrested
tortured
fifteen burned at the stake

sometimes writers
parody themselves

known for a distinctive style
they are doomed
to adopt it

many a poem
struggling to be sincere
seems false

a robot could do better

 

Emergent Emergencies

she engaged with the plants and the birds, beyond names, beyond taxonomies 
sometimes in a restaurant I finger the flowers to test if they are artificial
the mis-capes of our senses, the mistakes of imaginations
she realised now how much she used synaesthesia as a technique and toolbox
it was unclear from the muggy conference paper what the speaker was mistily proposing 
his home was a converted warehouse where he held gigs for the underplayed 
they mapped their indigenous homelands together with him to resist the threat of mining 
the island of Sommarøy self-declared itself as the world’s first time-free zone 
kingdoms that had previously been united started breaking into tiny pieces
is my microphone on? she asked, igniting the loose switch of hearing
a woman woke up from a coma after twenty-seven vaporised years
for enjoying music, you are more of a performer than a listener 
don’t treat as a metaphor that which is completely literal 
who killed Dag Hammarskjöld: do we even know that he was murdered?
the girl never looked up from her phone in eye-assaulting surroundings 
she was blind but saw concrete objects, he pierced the world through a muting haze
melting ice and psychological meltdowns made for a cosmic cocktail 

Postscript

When she read the letter again, she felt the same dismay as when she first encountered it. It was surprising that the letter had survived, interred under other letters. It was over forty years old, part of an era before email. It should have been torn up or burnt; it would have been better if it had been, but it had endured.

The letter had been in a box with other letters and although she had sorted methodically through that box several times, she had never found it. Then suddenly, when she opened the box yet again, it rose up still alive, unlike its author or the sentiments it transmitted.

The box was the archive she had made of her mother’s papers. Her mother had snatched the letter from her and then kept it. She had saved it as evidence but evidence of what?

She had a choice because she could avoid reading it again. At the moment she could only remember the tone and the drift and not the actual words. She did not need to invite the letter back in, allow it through the door.

But the letter offered itself like a sick temptation and so she did read it. It was still disturbing even though so much time had passed and everything in the letter had been resolved and no longer mattered. The pain was quieter, much quieter, but it was still drawing breath. Nothing in it was meant or felt anymore. Yet those words had been said, and words cannot be reversed, though they can be forgiven.

The letter had been written to try and stop her from marrying. But marry she did.

She did not want other people to read it and it would have a different import for them. Only she could unpick its code. Only she could know that its threats were not really threats and had evaporated, as if they had never been.

Only she could grasp that the sender had never wanted to write the letter in the first place.

Much had happened since she had last read the letter. She had acquired a context for it; she could see it in a less destructive light. She still disagreed with it, she brooded about why anyone — let alone a father — would pen such a letter, but she also understood it a little more.

The letter was present in every other letter she received even though it was a remnant from the past. It had outgrown itself, had evolved beyond the moment in which it was written and the fear that induced it. It was warning and incentive, meaning and its collapse.

It formed the basis of everything she had since read, everything she had since written.

 

Cool Shrug

tall gesture    road mine    bloated stance    unsafe dousing    changing lunacy    shuddering reminder resisting incest    buoyant depletions    dreamt menstruating    unsettled chicken    cool shrug    suddenly seen    ideas squinted    deftly counting    assumed ambit    chickenfeed composite     burbling tombs  sense unwrapped    plaza wavering    unsettling cooking    nearby homebody    child’s absorption

unsafe road    tall tombs    child’s shrug    unwrapped chicken    composite ideas    incestuous burbling buoyant wavering     bloated homebody    sudden dreams    deftly cooked    seen resistance     changing absorption    assumed menstruation    depleted stance     nearly counting    chickenfeed sense    doused plaza    cool reminder    squinting lunacy    mined ambit    unsettling gesture    cool shuddering

burbling stance    bloated gesture    composite shudder    dousing tombs    unsettled plaza    chickenfeed stance    tall ideas    coolest depletions    suddenly deft    changing shrug    homebody squinting    dreamt reminder    mine child    wavering absorption    buoyant resistance    nearly lunatic    cooked chicken assumed road    unsafe ambit    incest unwrapped    menstrual counting

Hazel Smith has published four volumes of poetry including Word Migrants, Giramondo, 2016, and numerous performance and multimedia works. In 2018, with Will Luers and Roger Dean, she was awarded first place in the Electronic Literature Organisation’s Robert Coover prize for the work novelling. Hazel is an Emeritus Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University. She has written several academic books including most recently The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship: intermedia, voice, technology, cross-cultural exchange, Routledge, 2016. Her web page is at www.australysis.com

She writes that Cool Shrug "is a computer-assisted poem. The words were generated by Roger Dean by means of machine learning (deep learning) techniques in the computer platform Python. They were then algorithmically (and non-computationally) organized by the author."

 
 

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