Eight Track, Oana Avasilichioaei
Talonbooks, 2019
The Canada Council for the Arts’ 2020
Governor General's Literary Awards poetry shortlist
The
2020 Governor General's Literary Awards winners will be announced on Tuesday,
June 1, 2021.
Oana Avasilichioaei interweaves poetry, sound, photography, and translation to explore an expanded idea of language, polyphonic structures, and borders of listening. Her six collections of poetry and poetry hybrids include Eight Track (Talonbooks, 2019, finalist for the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry and the Governor General’s Literary Award) and Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015). She has created many performance/sound works, written a libretto for a one-act opera (Cells of Wind, 2020), and translated ten books of poetry and prose from French and Romanian, including Catherine Lalonde’s The Faerie Devouring (Book*hug 2018, QWF’s Cole Foundation Prize for Translation) and Bertrand Laverdure’s Readopolis (Book*hug, 2017, Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation). She’s physically based in Montreal and virtually at oanalab.com.
Eight Track seems very much constructed as a book-length project. How did it originally begin, and what did you learn through the process?
I tend to work on book-length (and in recent years, beyond the book too) projects as I’m very interested in exploring the fuller world of a particular idea. The first piece I worked on for Eight Track (before I had even conceptualized it as so) is the final long poem in the book, “Tracking Animal.” I worked on this poem, on and off, for years, so in a sense it was written throughout the writing of the rest of the book too. I knew from the start that “Tracking Animal” would be a long work, long enough to be a book in itself, but I wasn’t satisfied with leaving it at that. In writing it, and because the idea of “tracking” was in it from the very beginning, I became fascinated with how many meanings this seemingly simple word has in English, and thus embarked on more fully delving into these meanings.
Sound on the page has been very important to me for a long time, and it led initially to my exploration of it off the page as well. With each book, I am curious to discover ways of investigating sound in more depth or from more varied perspectives on the page. I certainly don’t think of it in terms of loss, but of how rich and generative the page can be. The spacing, syntax, punctuation, phonemes, font, gradations of type are all ways of examining or mining the sonic qualities and meanings of language. One of the differences, however, between the page and live performance is that once printed, the page is set in one particular way (though as readers, we of course bring our own individual interpretations to it), whereas in performance, the acoustic qualities of the space, the bodies of the audience, the specificities of the sound system, and how I as a performer I might be feeling that day (in my body and voice, for example), among other aspects, will all affect the performance in the live moment. This demands much active and attentive listening from the performer, so that they can adjust what they might do in any one instance.
Given your exploration of form, from visual to sound, in this collection, what is it about the poem that holds your attention? What is it about poetry that anchors your attention from falling more fully into other forms?
Because I feel that language shapes and defines human beings to such a profound extent, I am (and will likely always be) endlessly curious about how this happens. For me, the poem remains the most versatile and malleable way of exploring this because of its concision, focus, attention to the paralinguistic qualities of language, boundless possibility of form, and dynamic presence, among many other aspects.
Can you expand on how you have been working “beyond the book”?
By this I mean taking poetry and literature out of the book and into other mediums such as performance, audio works, and even video. Eight Track is in a sense a multiform project that includes the book Eight Track, but that also exceeds the boundaries of the book with audio works such as “Eight over Two: A Soundtrack,” a multimedia performance called OPERATOR, and the filmpoem “Tracking Animal (an extemporization).”
I’m fascinated with the ways in which you move between different languages, exploring the connections, overlaps and disconnects both through translation of other works, and utilizing multiple languages within your own writing. How did this particular play first emerge?
In a way, you could say it emerged as far back as when I first began to learn a second language (i.e. English) as a child (Romanian is my first language), as through this conscious learning of another language I realized how differently one thinks in different languages, how plastic and malleable languages can be, how much they change and evolve by how we use them, by how we place them in our bodies and mouths, how fundamentally social they are. Exploring the interstices between them, using the syntax of one to influence the syntax of another, creating fractures and interventions by bringing the sounds of one into the sounds of another, all this gives me incredible freedom in writing and thinking, as well as, more importantly, makes me discover any language in new ways, compels me to keep reconsidering, learning, and pushing its meanings.
Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Eight Track was completed? What have you been working on since?
I’ve began another large, multiform poetic project called CHAMBERSONIC that translates between different ways of scripting language and voice experiments, performing scores, and capturing/transmitting audio. With a focus on voice—its aural potential, silencing, inscribed interpretation—it will ultimately figure a hybrid poetry book and other traces such as an octophonic sound installation, audio works, graphic scores, and live performances. A poetry and audio sample from this current work was published in The Capilano Review last fall.