Hazel White
California
Writing
Affiliate, 2019 - 2022
Affiliate, 2012 - 2015
Artist Statement
I’m the author of two poetry books that are predominantly about landscape. My attention shifted radically a few years ago to investigate the dimensions of systemic violence, especially the violence of whiteness. I’m exploring how language might open a breach—strip off the “civility” of silence and allow the brutality of racial, patriarchal, and capitalist power to be spoken and the consequences felt.
While at Headlands
This year I hope to finish a book of lyric prose/poetry about violence that is titled What’s Not the Same as a Purchase? It began as a morning practice during an Affiliate artist stay at Headlands several years ago—to post images and sonnet-length text on Facebook from Battery 129 above the Golden Gate Bridge. It includes some of those images, conversations with military veterans I met there, the violences of my childhood near Bristol, England, the history of slave trading in that city, and the violence of whiteness here in the street and resident in the white body.
Selected Texts
“Greetings from San Francisco,” Periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, October 2020
Poems from What’s Not the Same as a Purchase?, G U E S T 11, edited by Elizabeth Robinson, June 2020
Poems from Vigilance Is No Orchard, Nightboat Books, 2018
Walk for Two in the Ecotone of Language, Landscape, Nonviolence, Headlands Navigation Pamphlet, Key Room, 2017
Time, mini essay from Biotic Portal at Strawberry Creek, a Creative Work Fund project, 2016
Sonnet to Dead Reckoning, response to sculptor Nathan Lynch’s installation at YBCA, 2014
Lauren DiCioccio’s Familiars, catalog essay, Jack Fischer Gallery, 2014
I Want You to End Racism, from Tony Labat’s public art project “I Want You . . .”, SFMOMA 2008