nina jane drystek : 2025 VERSeFest interviews: Oana Avasilichioaei

 

 

 

Oana Avasilichioaei interweaves sound, poetry, performance, and translation to expand and trouble ideas of language, histories, polyphonic structures, and borders of listening. She has created many performance/sound works that mix electronics, ambient textures, noise, and vocal play, published seven collections of poetry hybrids, including Chambersonic (Talonbooks 2024), award-nominated Eight Track (Talonbooks 2019), and Limbinal (Talonbooks 2015), and written a libretto for a one-act opera Cells of Wind (FAWN Chamber Collective, 2022). She is based in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke.

Oana Avasilichioaei reads in Ottawa on Tuesday, March 25 as part of VERSeFest 2025.

nina jane drystek: Hi Oana, I am very excited that you are coming to Ottawa for VERSeFest as part of the Riverbed Reading Series showcase, curated by myself and Ellen Chang-Richardson. We have both really enjoyed your past work, and as poets who also experiment with sound and the page, we were very excited by the forms in CHAMBERSONIC.

Oana Avasilichioaei: Thank you very much for the invitation and interest in this work.

nj: CHAMBERSONIC is very much about sound, and the pieces in the collection reflect on the role sound plays in our world. CHAMBERSONIC features various sound pieces which you link to through QR codes in the book. As a poet, how did you move into sound art and performance?

O: I’ve always been fascinated with the performative space, even as a very young writer in the late ’90s when I first participated in open mics (in cafés and bars around Vancouver) and started to understand that the live stage is very different from the static page. Later, after co-writing Expeditions of a Chimæra (Book*hug, 2009) with Erín Moure and performing dual-voice readings with her, I got a glimpse of the vast potential of the non-singular voice. Soon after, I acquired my first pedal (a BOSS VE-20 vocal processor) and started experimenting with layering and multiplying my voice. This opened up a vast terrain of sound exploration, which has continued and expanded over the years. My writing, performance, sound art practices have become increasingly intertwined and cross-pollinating.

nj: When you are creating sound works, how does the page play into how you conceive them? Or do you start with sound itself? Space?

O: At this point, thinking about what “starts” something might be a kind of chicken and egg quandary. The catalysts for the sound works may be a text, a particular sound vocabulary or research, a concept, a graphic score, a material exploration of objects or tools, but even when it “starts” with a specific text, I might be driven to write that text partly because of some other sound or visual work I have previously made.

For every performance that involves my written texts, I never take a text exactly as I wrote it for the page and then simply add sound to it. Instead, I always extract, remake, recompose, resonify the text I am attempting to make performative. I re-envision it into a sort of score, which then no longer works on the page but only works in its new sonic medium. For me, this transformation is absolutely necessary to breathing sonic life into the paginated text.

nj: In CHAMBERSONIC, you have two variations on a piece. “Let Form Be Oral” is a graphic score, which places text within a musical staff, and “Let Form be Aural” is a QR code link to a recording of the piece. These are followed by a related third piece that is an essay and text interpretation of the sound work through the experience of recording it. Similarly, “Fellow Statements,” and “Chambersonic: Soundpace // Eavesdropping on the Process of a Dilettante Composer” is all about the process of creation. Why was including pieces about the experience of creation integral to this collection?

O: CHAMBERSONIC explores how sound and voices move in and through various types of chambers (bodies, organs, rooms, small and large spaces, theatres, as well a social constructs, which can act as enclosures) and how such chambers shape, determine, make possible, and also limit what these sounds and voices can be or do, how they behave, what they might become or transform into. As such, the book-album is more concerned with process, with how something becomes, and less concerned with the end results, the “products.” I felt this was important to explore in our contemporary moment when we are so obsessed with the immediate, the product, the outcome. Therefore, I used various strategies to embody the idea of process, including transmuting works into various media and writing about the act of creation.

nj: In addition to poems and QR code links, your collection also includes photographs and poetic essays, and visual poems. In that sense it is truly a hybrid work but in book form. Can you talk about how you pulled all these threads together?

O: This goes back to some of what I said in the previous answer, in that the threads weaving this web are the movements and existences, possibilities and impossibilities, enactments and silences of voices and sounds in various types of spaces. Altogether, the work endeavours to materialize and activate (in language, in the body, on the page, in an environment) an in-between space, something that is not of one genre, field, medium but exists and translates between and is materially made out of two or more genres, fields, media.

nj: There are many references and influences listed in your book, from the epigraphs to the acknowledgements. While reading your book I was thinking about Cecilia Vicuña’s Spit Temple, which was an important text for me as I began to think about sound and space. I had this little “aha!” moment while reading the acknowledgements when you mentioned it as a book that inspired your thinking while conceiving this collection. As your work is so interdisciplinary, I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about your influences and how they informed the ways you think about sound and language.

O: My influences are multiple, cross-genre, cross-generational, cross-historical, and plurilingual. They might include anything from poetry, philosophy, social discourse, sound and performance theory to experimental theatre and dance to electronic and ambient music to visual art and sound art. They might also include topographies, technologies, vegetation, industrial spaces, interior design and architecture, wind, colour, rock formations, urban alleys, clouds, ancient manuscripts, political transcripts. I guess what I am trying to say through this non-exhaustive list is that ultimately it is a deep curiosity about and an attentive listening to the world around me that propels most of what I write or make.

nj: The lines in “Chambersonic: A Graphic Score” reminded me of the work of Canadian-American visual artist Agnes Martin. Did her work filter in while you were working on this piece?

O: I’ve certainly been a longtime admirer of Agnes Martin, and the 2017 retrospective of her work, which I saw at the Guggenheim in New York, remains one of my favorite exhibitions. I would see any influence she may have on my work as a huge compliment. But there was something else that I wished to develop through “Chambersonic: A Graphic Score,” which is based on the musical staff. Whereas in traditional music notation, the notes arranged on the staff are the markers of sound, I wanted to transform the five lines of the staff into markers of sound in these drawings. The arrangement, spacing, length, thickness, shape, proximity, colour, and texture of the lines combine to suggest various gestures, qualities, volumes, tones, and frequencies of sound.

nj: This collection was exciting for me because its language and ideas resonated with those that I have been turning over lately. Of particular interest to me is the presence and relationship of the earth and sound. In your poem “Voice Scree,” you allude to the shifting of stone, both visually and thematically. In the piece “Chambersonic: Porous Seuil Possible Solo” you mention erratics among other aspects of the natural world: “Whose lifetime? You may ask. The insect’s? The tree’s? The human’s? The erratic’s? The planet’s?”. Perhaps this is too granular, but I would like to know why “scree,” why “erratics” resonate for you? And what role the earth and natural world play in your conception of sound art.

O: I imagine erratics, stones, and scree as the earth’s “noises,” as dissonant and cacophonous presences in their environments, but also ones that are very old and that shift over time, either very slowly or suddenly, so they also point to different notions of time. From these and from other patterns of the natural world, I draw inspiration for both written and sonic forms and structures and of how time can function within them. I often think of sound and language as environments, and I try to consider how natural, built, or socio-politically constructed environments affect those existing within them and how they in turn affect these contexts. As a species, we’ve become so disconnected from the natural world, which is in part what has led to the environmental crisis we’re currently facing. I want to resist this disconnection in any way that I can. Listening, doing field recordings, and experimenting with the interplay between naturally occurring sounds and mechanically or electronically made sounds are some of the ways I try to do this.

nj: Reading and listening to the works in this collection, I started to imagine what a performance of CHAMBERSONIC is like, and I cannot wait to see and hear it. I was hoping you could tell readers and people who will be attending VERSeFest a bit about what they can expect from a performance of CHAMBERSONIC.

O: The performance will focus on two sound works that feature vocal experiments and doublings, electronics, different types of microphones (which capture sound in a variety of ways), and also the drones of motors and electricity. 

 

 

 

 

 

nina jane drystek is a poet and performer based in Ottawa, Ontario, unceded lands of the Algonquin-Anishinaabe. she is the author of the chapbooks missing matrilineal (above/ground, 2023), a : of : in (Gap Riot Press, 2021) and knewro suite (Simulacrum Press, 2019), and two collaborative chapbooks with the collective vii, holy disorder of being (Gap Riot, 2022) and Towers (Collusion Books, 2021). she writes and performs sound poetry and was shortlisted for the 2020 Bronwen Wallace Poetry Award as well as the 2021 Priscilla Uppal Poetry Prize. more info at textcurious.ca

2020 Governor General's Literary Awards Poetry shortlist interviews: Oana Avasilichioaei

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.

 

Having seen you perform, I’m fascinated by the ways in which you approach layerings of sound. Sound is something that Eight Track explores far more openly than some of your previous published work. How important do you consider sound on the page? Do you feel there is anything lost at all in sound or cadence through working on the page? What is the difference? 

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.