Transfolding the in/between

Oana Avasilichioaei

If being transient, does it follow that the self of sien should breach bone?

If we transistor, does it follow that our tran and tor should be brothers, be sisters?

If to transcribe intends the scribe, does the train plunge off the page’s margins?

If s/he transpires, does the cause stem from a conflagration, a pyre, and so a sublimation?

If we transmit, does it follow that the you and the i meet in a we?

Does transpose actually posit anything?

How do we keep this page, this site, which is so transient, transposed and transitory, honest?

The Folding Borders commentaries attempted entrances into some of Canada’s poetic laboratories and, tempted by their hybrid languages, to traverse some of their experiments. Of course, many laboratories still remain unopened, many experiments still to be explored. A partial, random and certainly not exclusive list of further folds or essais might include The Institute for Domestic Research (Jacqueline Leggatt, Christine Stewart, Catriona Strang), the folk research of Phil Hall, the lingual bodies of Adeena Karasick, the archival delves of Kate Eichhorn, the dist/epics silver car sessions of Jake Kennedy and kevin mcpherson eckhoff, the performative inscriptions of Michael V. Smith, the sounding of Geneviève Letarte, the urbanism of Jeff Derksen, the interdisciplinary experiments of Chantal Neveu, the poetic medias of Jolanta Lapiak, the collaborative and visual work of Gary Barwin.

In archiving a present, in struggling pages into publicness, in protagonising our multiplicities, in socialing the labour of our languages, might we become new geographers of our own imagination? Not to progress but to egress our digressions. Slick necessity of lexical pavements. Voweled vocables perform, vacating yet voracious. Prepositions commit the oblige of speaking riffs, of riffing speech. What will margins riff for us? What resolutions will we chew? What dialogues will we tenor? Questions resist resolve.

November 29, 2011

< previous post

About Folding Borders

If we dare to enter the laboratory of Canadian poetry what experiments might we encounter? What transgressions might we be asked to face? The Folding Borders commentaries will focus on poets whose work exists on some kind of boundary/border, poetry that exists in-between, perhaps as intertext, perhaps as hybrid, perhaps as network. The border might be linguistic (i.e. work written in more than one language), technological (i.e. work that exists in some kind of interaction with technology), collaborative, sound-based, performance-based, digital (i.e. work that has both a printed and a digital form simultaneously), geographical, architectural or a combination of any of these.

Some of the strands in Oana Avasilichioaei’s work traverse geography and public space (feria: a poempark, 2008), textual architecture, orality and multilingualism (We, Beasts, upcoming 2012), translation and collaborative performance (Expeditions of a Chimæra, co-written with Erín Moure, 2009). Living in Montreal, recent projects include The Islands, a translation of Quebecoise poet Louise Cotnoir, “The Mapping Issue” (co-edited with Kathleen Brown for Dandelion Magazine) and collaborating with musicians and sound artists as hex laboratorium.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.