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

nina jane drystek : on missing matrilineal

 

 

 

 

 

In August 2021, my uncle was admitted to hospital in Ottawa. I dropped him off and parked his car at my place, marvelling at the absurdity of a tall leggy man driving a Nissan Micra. He had been in the hospital more than a few times and had health challenges for most of his life, so nothing seemed exceptionally unusual about his visit.

Over the course of four months, I visited with him, and he didn’t get any fresh air save for the minutes between his transfer from hospital to ambulance to hospital back in Barry’s Bay. Remembering my grandfather’s hospital transfers decades earlier, I expected that it would be hard on Ray, but he still wanted to go, to get back home. A short while after his return, Uncle Ray passed away.

You hope, before someone dies, that you will have the chance to ask them all the questions that have bubbled up and never been uncovered. You think you have time. You think, later, later. While I am sure there are some who can bridge that gap in time, and as much as I wish I was one of them, the fear of knowing or upsetting or being hurt or being seen holds me back (especially when it comes to family). Then, sometimes suddenly, that thread is cut. Who will you turn to now for answers?

In many ways I consider my uncle a part of my matrilineal line (here, I mean the line of matriarchs, not strictly my mother’s line, of which he was not). He deeply admired his mother, my grandmother. He knit and made us sweaters and even left me a pair of handmade socks. He never shied away from talking about my mum, who died when I was barely a teenager, and though it hurt for many years to hear him mention her, he only ever held a great fondness for Mary-Jane. He was loyal and loved each one of his nieces and his nephew. He was gay and no one really talked about it.

Though I was there on his final day, I still feel I let him down as I fumbled through the process. At the end, he told me, I want to be surrounded by family. It was a process I had missed learning from with the previous familial death—that of my grandmother Eleanor in 2013. That’s only one of the reasons I needed to be there.

In our last conversation, I told Ray that I remembered the pink dress he bought me and how we drove around listening to country music, and he remembered too. I said I wished we had more time and that I would write poems about him, but I don’t know if that made him happy or sad or if he was indifferent (to poetry, that is, which many people in my family are). While that poem is not in missing matrilineal, Ray has a cameo in the first long poem alongside his brothers (my other uncle and my dad), and the church he loved in Wilno is almost as prominent as when you drive past it on Highway 60.

Often we think about grief when it comes to death is often about grief, but there is also wonder—all that is left unknown, all that was never said, all that changes. It creates spaces to string with spiderweb memories, to test to see if they hold. The two long poems in this collection are about that, about communing with my mother and grandmother, and creating a link with my briefly born sister, Isabelle, through the work of Toulouse Lautrec and the family home that is now my home.

What is the middle poem? What is the body? What is the mind? All these floating scraps wrapping us tight?

Perhaps loss has bred my dysmorphic relationship with the world. Certainly, it is circumstance intimately felt. A fractured lyric, a secret language, misremembered memories and fairy tales tapped for (mis)guidance. Thirty years on. Twenty years on. Ten years. Two. How do we account for how far we’ve come? What has become? Perhaps accounting has nothing to do with it, but I keep tracing it back in this way. And my own thread? Where does the cast meet the dark surface? I cannot know, though I regularly fear it is shorter than I think.

Still, there are these poems. And there will be more. And I hope that you enjoy their strangeness, their language, their unexpected sexuality and confusion—after all, haven’t you felt it too?

 

 

 

 

nina jane drystek is a poet, writer and performer based in Ottawa, unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory. she is author of a:of:in (Gap Riot Press, 2021), knewro suite (Simulacrum Press, 2019) and missing matrilineal (above/ground press, 2023), and her poems have appeared in online and print publications, as well as in self-published chapbooks and broadsides. her original sound poem scores can be heard on bandcamp. she is one of the co-founders of Riverbed Reading Series, was shortlisted for the 2020 Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry, writes collaborative poetry with VII – authors of holy disorder of being (Gap Riot, 2022) and Towers (Collusion Books, 2021) – and performs sound poetry with the rotating group of collaborators. if you have ever lived in the same city as her you have likely seen her riding a red or blue bicycle. you can find her @textcurious.

nina jane drystek : Three poems

 

 

for another heart beat

winds whip through these hills
gather in the valley 

moonbow
semi-transparent white

a glass from the cupboard
what was it you wanted

dust whorl of a broom
the system brings what it does

nothing is stationary
in this universe everything sways

shifts swift hunger bunching
unfold the tulle of my crinoline

needles crunch grass
don me

dance me closely

 

 

 

midsummer

you take water into yourself          you
take it out          transform it          taste it           tackle
it to your cells          grapple me           roll us
in the dust          soak          mud puddle          i
never meant to make you          did you
make me          our cells unfolding
a spring          a fan          endless rolling sprawl
stunned          stung by sunlight

i am drained          i am dripping          melting slowly

shock me solid          lighten me
lightning          lessen this lounging
lust me inside the folds of your ear
trap me among crystals          sound
beats setting body off balance          you destabilize        
spin          i would gladly be here again          soberly sullied

what softness makes me          i unmake          picking          panicking

unripe apples fall        bruise          begin to rot
before my eyes          a rat makes off with one         lying here
on the oblong stones          i am delectable        
reaching my hand lustily          do you feel it          crawl
my hands along your shadow          dripping between          cracks for sand

 

one / five twenty five
 

smooth white buds pop from fuzz
curl blooming magnolia

red cardinal arc flutters a trill
melody calling back to itself

for the first time i recognise a song
from branch to fence squirrels chatter

virus versus iris
today confirms she is within me

i cannot smell spring but know she is here
the sky is beyond and i am within it

count on my fingers when
did my breath catch in her presence

back and forth along this path
try to trace health lines

when panic became a warning sign
flutter in my chest

subtle usual, subtle unusual
my nose knows creeping is no illusion

who hears, who knows i am here
crying behind the hydro pole

days ago i ran and ran and ran
the world was opening

today nothing feels more beautiful
than looking up, harbouring

i am keeping her under wraps
no strength to make an escape

dot on a line statistic
i am not the first or last vessel

suckle hurl seethe i will her
negotiation needs negation

change is a new category
green husks fall from above for living

 

 

 

nina jane drystek is a poet, writer and performer based in Ottawa, unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory. she is author of knewro suite (Simulacrum Press, 2019) and her poems have appeared in several print and online publications, as well as in self-published chapbooks and broadsides. her original sound poetry scores can be heard on bandcamp. she is one of the co-founders of Riverbed ReadingSeries, was shortlisted for the 2020 Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry, writes collaborative poetry with VII, and performs sound poetry with the ensemble quatuour gualuour. if you have ever lived in the same city as her you have likely seen her riding a red or blue bicycle. you can find her @textcurious