'A poem is not a puzzle with a correct answer' : Anne Brewster in conversation with Hazel Smith

In an incisive review of Hazel Smith’s fifth book of poetry, ecliptical, Chris Arnold gestures to Smith’s reputation as a ‘relentlessly experimental’ poet. He notes the book title’s uncanny – because unintended but entirely logical – connection with Ern Malley’s iconoclastic The Darkening Ecliptic, to draw out some intriguing comparisons between these two books. Since her first volume, Abstractly Represented, Smith has been an innovator in Australia, in linguistic and generic experimentation. She has also been a pioneer in performance writing, intermedia work and electronic writing and her work has continued to break new ground over an impressive career spanning four decades. Nevertheless, Smith loses no time in problematising the descriptor ‘experimental’ in this interview. During our interview, Smith reflects on her commitment to expanding her own flamboyantly eclectic repertoire, discussing her interest in enigma, immersion, the alignment of the satirical and the surreal, the discomfort that humour in poetry often produces and computer-generated text. Smith had formerly been a professional musician and examines music’s formative impact on her poetry. She excavates her complex relationship with her Jewish heritage and talks frankly about the strictures of proscribed ethnic identities. Smith’s critical cosmopolitanism is evident in tropes of migration, displacement and transgenerational trauma, and in her attention, throughout these poems, to the precarity of many diasporic peoples.