Oana Avasilichioaei, Chambersonic

 

Fellow Statements, Fellow Murmurs

Fellow statements, fellow hungry mouths, fellow introverts, fellow inner voices, fellow dynamic duets, fellow quiet revolutions, fellow unheroic holograms, fellow calls to justice, fellow pacts, fellow linguistic migrants, I call on you. // Fellow bonds, borders, and bodies that won’t be silenced, bellow bones that won’t be disappeared, fellow fierce rattling and unshackling, fellow divergent voices, fellow dissidents and discordants, I call on you. // Fellow tantrums and episodic madnesses, fellow imaginary voices that refuse to be forgotten, fellow phantoms, fellow ghosted and silenced, fellow unsung marginals, fellow musical mastodons struggling against extinction, fellow rejects, fellow ephemera, fellow notes, notations, marginalia, magic markers, fellow believers and non-believers and disbelievers and beyond-believers, I call on you. // Fellow murmurs and fissures, whispers and cracks, rumblings and time gaps, fellow articulations and disarticulations, fellow thoraxes and tongues, fellow dreamers, mystics, and visionaries, I call on you. // Fellow mispronounced, mistreated, misunderstood, misengineered, misallocated, misinformed, misrepresented, I call on you. Pronounce your part.

Furthering the evolution of Montreal poet, translator and performer Oana Avasilichioaei’s explorations around sound, language, meaning and performance comes Chambersonic (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), her seventh-full length poetry title over the past twenty years. Beginning with her debut, Abandon (Toronto ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2005), and continuing with feira:a poempark (Wolsak & Wynn, 2008), Expeditions of a Chimæra (with Erín Moure; Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010), We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012), Limbinal (Talonbooks, 2015) [see my review of such here] and Eight Track (Talonbooks, 2019) [see my review of such here], Avasilichioaei’s work has moved from origins of language, translation and between-ness into a poetics deeply engaged with the intersections (within the between-ness, as well) of text, sound and performance. “It begins with desire.” the section “Chambersonic : Soundpace // Eavesdropping / on the Process of a Dilettante Composer,” subtitled “(on the making of Chambersonic : Episodes for an Absent Film),” begins [with back-slashes set here as included in the text, not as line-break notation], “A longing for what is yet to be conceived. Faint and fragmentary glimmers of ideas, sound heard in the mind’s ear: elongated resonances, long drawn-out frequencies advancing and receding in waves, layers, reverberations // static, silent extensions // sometimes sparse, sometimes full // a sea of glass, a more active, rougher sea of surf and foam and wind // plucked chords // long vocal vowellings fading into breathlessness.”

Chambersonic is constructed as a long poem across fifteen sections/scores, two bridges and an opening breath, “Chambersonic Intro: Fellow Statements,” a poem subtitled “(an audio work & lathe-cut vinyl / imagined from Fellow Statements, Fellow Murmurs, 04:48),” a five stanza/prose block text that begins: “Breath The closing of the door transforms the sound studio into a cocoon. / Soft light demarcates the edges, while at the centre stands a simple install- / lation: a small table, chair, recorder, and two vocal microphones. The outer / world seems unfathomably distant in both time and space.” The scale of this project is impressive, incorporating intervals, echoes, sound scores and layerings, as Avasilichioaei’s Chambersonic not only holds the full-length collection as her field of composition but one that incorporates sound and breath as foundational, echoing off the boundaries of the physical object of the book. “Voices will one day ignite and spill over,” she offers, to open the section “Chambersonic : Echoes,” “fill in new fractures. They will not / retract but keep on spilling.”

Oana Avasilichioaei, Eight Track

If this were a demonstration, voices would clamour with one tongue

If this were a vision, voices would speak prophetically about the past

If this were history, some voices would be forgotten ignored rewritten

If this were telepathy, a voice would be mystically multiplied

If this were a melodrama, voices would babble hiccup sob

If this were a circus, voices would show off their plumage then slip out of

someone’s grasp

If this were a game, some voices would have difficulty understanding the

concept of sides

(“Voices (remix)”)

Montreal poet and translator Oana Avasilichioaei’s sixth full-length collection [see myreview of her prior collection, here], Eight Track (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2019), writes on the overlap of two competing directions: the layering of audio tracks, and the increasing surveillance of both governments and corporations of our actions, movements and interactions. The book is constructed out of a series of sections, from radio scripts to a sequence of fragments to lyric theses to a series of counter-surveillance photos (photos of surveillance cameras around Montreal): “Voices (remix),” “Q & A,” “A Study in Portraiture,” “Trackers,” “If,” “On Origins (a radio drama with interference),” “Trackscapes” and “Tracking Animal (a survival + tracker’s marginalia),” as well as a “Bonus Track,” “Eight over Two (a soundtrack).” Given her performance explorations with recorded and looped sound, I am fascinated with how she turns some of those explorations back around into the text on the page, although nothing that breaks away into looped or overlapping text, a line of concrete and visual that she works up to, but never actually crosses. Avasilichioaei writes her poems, and even her photo-sequences, as poem-essays, writing through meaning, narrative and distance, targeting a sequence of ideas though both language and image. Her poems map out a range of occurrence, offering not answers per se, but making one aware of possibilities that might not have connected, or been previously known. As she writes of the poem/section “Trackscapes” in her “Liner Notes,” a poem on “The Líneas y Geoglifos de Nasca y Palpa, or the Nasca Lines, [that] li in the pampa of southern Peru, an arid plain nestled between the foothills of the Andes and the coast”:

As this is one of the driest regions in the world, the natural elements have preserved the Lines over centuries, though some have been damaged by human disregard (the Carretera Panamericana cuts through them, for example). It was only in 1994 that the The Líneas y Geoglifos de Nasca y Palpa were declared a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site. Many have speculated on their purpose, the more current thought being that they were ceremonial and related to water rituals (the Nasca left waterworks and aqueducts still used today), the cleared areas functioning as open-air temples. The wanderer Bruce Chatwin called them a “totemic map” (The Songlines) and poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña, a “libro desierto” or “desert book” (A Book of the Book).

In adding my voice/eye to those who have worked from this desert book, my intent is not to tell or document, for their story is not mine to tell. I can only visually attend to a story whose messages may have floundered in the floods and been buried in the earthquakes and wars that, by the eighth century, had decimated the Nasca. I bear presence to their abstraction, the (constantly shifting) drawings shaped by interactions between sky, environment, topography, perspective, and traces of human movement. In our world, so many meanings of track or tracking are negative, oppressive. The Líneas de Nasca stand in stark contrast to offer positive traces of human endeavour and survival. At the same time, they expose limitations of Western or Northern views and voices. They point to knowledge systems that valorize an intimate and necessary relationship to the ecosystems of the region; they trace a sense of connectedness, integrity, interconnection: an interwoven palimpsest of relationships with other people, animals, symbolic structures, the environment, and water. The lines are communal, for the required a group of people to make them, and they inspire movement and migration, necessary human acts.

Pallaksch, Pallaksch #3

Mouth is a sound. Voice is

a sound. Molding of mouth

is a sound. Molding of voices is a sound and

not response – because

who bays under the vowels

rings to infinity.

A day is a day is a room is a shadow

is a woman is a dog is a bed is a lamp

is even you. (“PRESENTING ROBERT CREELEY,” Jean Daive, trans. Norma Cole)

I am disappointed to hear that the third issue (2017) of Pallaksch, Pallaksch is the final [see my review of the first issue here], a trade volume of poetry edited by Elizabeth Robinson and Steven Seidenberg and produced through Instance Press. Deliberately including hefty sections by each author, this new issue features work by George Albon, Oana Avasilichioaei, Kate Colby, Jean Daive (trans. Norma Cole), Moyna Pam Dick, Steve Dickison, Ossian Foley, William Fox, Peter Gurnis, Carrie Hunter, Rodney Koeneke, Marie Larson, Pattie McCarthy, Rachel Moritz, Beth Murray, Frances Richard, James Sherry, B.J. Soloy and Craig Watson. Frustratingly (for me, at least), this is a journal that exists without bios (but at least I have google). I was quite taken with the work by French poet Jean Daive, translated by Canadian expat (and active translator) Norma Cole. This is not the first time Cole has translated Daive’s work, as she has translated a handful of volumes of his work into English, most recently A Woman with Several Lives (La Presse, 2012)and White Decimal (Omnidawn, 2017) [see my essay here in which I speak to Cole directly about one of her translations]. I’m fascinated by the blend of precise language and abstract thought in this sequence. As Daive writes, via Cole: “You seemed like – an unfolded alphabet // baying // with this idea that still shakes.”

I drank, and I turned into a liquid, and I spilled onto the ground, and people stepped into me. And they slipped.

My holes frighten me. Today there are twenty-three of them. Some moist, some dry and rough. One or two so small only an ant could enter them.

Yesterday I was impenetrable. A glass marble with a blue wave or ribbon inside it. Today I am being punished.

It’s best when I am a marble that is also opaque.

For instance, white with an orange swirl.

Then God wishes to win me.

Instead, something is running up and down inside my body. it’s trampling my nerves.

The townspeople speak of a dybbuk. But my mama never wanted to be near me, much less inside of me. And my papa is still living.

Perhaps it’s my own future spirit. So misanthropic that it can bear to haunt only me, thus it must get started early.

Or else it is a stranger who could be cherished. A young religious man, an artistic French girl, an old grocer, a spinster who bites her nails, a Chinese poet. (“from I AM WRITING YOU FROM AFAR,” Moyna Pam Dick)

What really allows the work in Pallaksch, Pallaksch to shine is the journal’s openness to longer sections, allowing each author to stretch out, whether with an array of shorter pieces, or longer poems and/or excerpts that might not be possible in other journals. Pattie McCarthy’s section includes a healthy selection of poems from her QWEYNE WIFTHING (see my recent review of such here), and Oana Avasilichioaei’s excerpt from “TRACKING ANIMAL (A SURVIVAL)” stretches and pulls apart description, tracking and providing a sequence of small points: “If already / the others instinct the auto of my animal, / an i bios.” And I appreciate being reminded of the work of the late Beth Murray, her logical disconnects that somehow highlights far deeper connections, as she writes in her poem “FULL BELLIES”:

now there is never a wood, only ridge-tops

but the mountain underneath is writing it differently

and the conifer-people often empty in their bellies,

when firest take the inner pith and xylem,

bark and cambium lining it survive

do you know what pulls water up the trunk?

pressure in roots less than soil draws in liquid

evaporating water from leaves creates surface tension

pulls liquid up

root pressure is highest in the morning before stomata in leaves opens

stomata are the mouths that expel mist of breath

we are used to being humans who like full bellies

belly tells us when it wants food

The pieces in Pallaksch, Pallaksch are very much engaged with the minutae of language, with an overlap of concerns seen in another late, lamented journal, 6x6, produced by Brooklyn’s Ugly Duckling Presse [see my review of their final issue here]. There is a great deal of impressive work in this issue by a multitude of authors. Despite mourning the loss of this journal, I will keep my eye out for whatever the editors might decide to do next.

the world is less and less abiogenetic. aphids spring from the dew that collects on leaves, flies from putrid waste, mice from the hayloft, crocodiles from fallen trees at the bottom of a river

biopoeisis

a mouse and snake jumped into a boat

the boat turned into my stomach

I’m old

I think I’m dying (“FROM AN UNTITLED POEM,” Marie Larson)