Quebec Writers' Federation Workshops

Spring Session 2012

TECHNIQUE/TECHNOLOGY/TEXT: A POETIC LAB

Eight Wednesdays, 8:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. (March 7 –April 25, 2011)

1200 Atwater Avenue, Suite 3
Workshop leader: Oana Avasilichioaei

Enter the poetry laboratory and experiment with voicing your poetic texts on and off the page! This lab will help participants develop one longer poetic work or a sequence of shorter works that bridge sound and text, the voiced page and staged word. While focusing on questions of composition and movement, pacing, embodiment, memorization, and the translation between mediums, participants will explore new techniques that will help reinvigorate their own writing processes.

In this poetry laboratory, we will spend some time on relevant literary works and poetic performances, some time engaging in interactive activities that will encourage participants to generate and grow their poetic texts, and some time developing performance abilities. Participants will also be introduced to technologies such as vocal processors that can be used to manipulate the voice and create layered acoustic experiences. Depending on interest, the workshop could culminate in a performance event of the work produced

Oana Avasilichioaei is a Montreal poet and translator whose work traverses geography and public space (feria: a poempark, 2008), textual architecture, orality and multilingualism (We, Beasts, upcoming 2012), collaborative performance (Expeditions of a Chimæra, co-written with Erín Moure, 2009) and translation (The Islands, from the Quebecois French of Louise Cotnoir, 2011). She was the 2009 Vancouver writer in residence at Green College, UBC and the 2010-2011 Calgary writer in residence at the University of Calgary. Recent projects include “The Mapping Issue” (co-edited with Kathleen Brown for Dandelion Magazine) and writing commentaries on Canadian experimental poetry for Jacket2 (jacket2.org/commentary/oana-avasilichioaei). Some audio work can be found at: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Avasilichioaei.php.

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