Oana Avasilichioaei, Chambersonic

 

Fellow Statements, FellowMurmurs

Fellow statements, fellowhungry 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 bedisappeared, fellow fierce rattling and unshackling, fellow divergent voices,fellow dissidents and discordants, I call on you. // Fellow tantrums andepisodic madnesses, fellow imaginary voices that refuse to be forgotten, fellowphantoms, fellow ghosted and silenced, fellow unsung marginals, fellow musicalmastodons struggling against extinction, fellow rejects, fellow ephemera,fellow notes, notations, marginalia, magic markers, fellow believers andnon-believers and disbelievers and beyond-believers, I call on you. // Fellowmurmurs and fissures, whispers and cracks, rumblings and time gaps, fellowarticulations and disarticulations, fellow thoraxes and tongues, fellowdreamers, mystics, and visionaries, I call on you. // Fellow mispronounced,mistreated, misunderstood, misengineered, misallocated, misinformed,misrepresented, I call on you. Pronounce your part.

Furtheringthe evolution of Montreal poet, translator and performer Oana Avasilichioaei’sexplorations around sound, language, meaning and performance comes Chambersonic (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), her seventh-full length poetry title overthe 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; TorontoON: 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 oflanguage, translation and between-ness into a poetics deeply engaged with the intersections(within the between-ness, as well) of text, sound and performance. “It beginswith desire.” the section “Chambersonic : Soundpace // Eavesdropping / on theProcess of a Dilettante Composer,” subtitled “(on the making of Chambersonic :Episodes for an Absent Film),” begins [with back-slashes set here as includedin the text, not as line-break notation], “A longing for what is yet to beconceived. Faint and fragmentary glimmers of ideas, sound heard in the mind’sear: elongated resonances, long drawn-out frequencies advancing and receding inwaves, layers, reverberations // static, silent extensions // sometimes sparse,sometimes full // a sea of glass, a more active, rougher sea of surf and foamand wind // plucked chords // long vocal vowellings fading into breathlessness.”

Chambersonic is constructed as a long poem acrossfifteen sections/scores, two bridges and an opening breath, “ChambersonicIntro: Fellow Statements,” a poem subtitled “(an audio work & lathe-cutvinyl / imagined from Fellow Statements, Fellow Murmurs, 04:48),” a fivestanza/prose block text that begins: “Breath The closing of the doortransforms 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 unfathomablydistant in both time and space.” The scale of this project is impressive, incorporatingintervals, echoes, sound scores and layerings, as Avasilichioaei’s Chambersonicnot only holds the full-length collection as her field of composition but onethat incorporates sound and breath as foundational, echoing off the boundariesof 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.”