12 or 20 (second series) questions with Adriana Oniță

Adriana Oniță is a poet, artist, educator, editor, translator, and researcher with a PhD in arts-based language education. She writes and teaches in English, Romanian, Spanish, French, and Italian. Her debut poetry collection, Descântec For My Split Tongue, is published by Palimpsest Press / Anstruther Books. Her multilingual poems also appear in CBC Books, The Globe and Mail, The Ex-Puritan, Canthius, Tint Journal, and in her chapbooks: Misremembered Proverbs (above/ground press, 2023) and Conjugated Light (Glass Buffalo, 2019). As founder of The Polyglot, she is proud to have published more than 250 writers, translators, and artists working in over 60 languages. She is the editorial director at the Griffin Poetry Prize and lives between Edmonton and Italy. Discover her work at adrianaonita.com.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I was twenty-five when the Edmonton Arts Council awarded me a grant to wander the city, paint in unexpected places, and write poems in response, which became my first translingual chapbook, Conjugated Light (published by Matthew Stepanic at Glass Buffalo, 2019). Then came Misremembered Proverbs, which you published with above/ground press rob! These two chapbooks changed my life because they proved that I could create collections that combined poetry and visual art, find publishers who believed in the work, and begin sharing them with readers across Canada.

Descântec For My Split Tongue, my first full-length collection, feels different, not only because it took sixteen years to write, but because so much life happened in between. I learned new languages, got married, earned a PhD, started The Polyglot, became a mother, lost my grandmother, worked so many jobs, made homes in different cities. The book grew alongside me. When I read it now, I can hear the voices of my younger selves speaking to one another across time, and also speaking to my ancestors, whose stories and silences have shaped me. It’s an indescribably beautiful feeling.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

“Cățeluș cu părul creț / fură rața din coteț!” As a child, poetry was the most captivating to me—sound, rhythm, image, and story worked their magic on me all at once (as Coleridge observed, prose may be “words in the best order,” but poetry is "the best words in the best order"!)

There's nothing more evocative to me than memorizing and reciting a poem by heart, which I did in Grade 1 in Jilava, Romania, Grade 3 in Edmonton in Mrs. Becker's class, all the way through to Derek Walcott's courses at the University of Alberta (“Altogether elsewhere, vast / Herds of reindeer move across / Miles and miles of golden moss, / Silently and very fast.”)

I hope to explore fiction and nonfiction more deeply in the future, but poetry still has a strong hold on me. Poetry is my private “laboratorio liberatorio,” where I get to play and experiment (remember poiesis means to make!). It can hold my uncertainties, contradictions, multiple tongues, and competing truths all at once, without demanding that they be resolved. It’s the genre that feels closest to the way I actually experience the world.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

These days, it's so easy not to start a project—I even paused in the middle of writing this sentence to breastfeed—that beginning at all feels miraculous! Once I've arrived at the page, I try to protect that momentum and return to it daily, even if only for fifteen minutes. I have so many books asking to be written: children's books, hybrid books of collage, poetry, and essay, books on language learning, and at least a dozen collaborative projects with friends. My first drafts often come quickly, but I've found that I do my best work when there's some form of sharing. I was most prolific when I brought a new poem each week to my writing coach, Tara Skurtu, or to the Multilingual Art Lab of The Polyglot, where the drafts could be shaped and sharpened in conversation.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

For me, a poem usually begins with a question, a proverb, a painting, or a moment of surprise that I can't quite shake. While I often write individual poems first, I do enjoy thinking about the collection very early in the process. Perhaps that's the teacher and editor in me, but I'm often asking how a poem might be speaking to other poems, what larger conversation it belongs to, or what themes or tensions are beginning to emerge. I love the moment when a handful of seemingly unrelated pieces suddenly reveal themselves as part of the architecture of the same book.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Public readings are a very important part of my creative process. I love open mics and readings because I believe poetry is, at its heart, an oral art form. Poems are meant to be spoken, heard, recited, memorized, and carried from one person to another. Reading a poem aloud teaches me things that the page alone cannot: where the energy falters, where the languages sing, where listeners lean in, laugh—or when I lose them. In that sense, readings are also a form of revision. Some of my most important edits have come from reading a translingual poem in front of others, and discovering, in real time, how it lands in a room.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I'm interested in how languages are learned, lost, silenced, reclaimed, and revitalized. I wrote Descântec For My Split Tongue as an incantation to reclaim Romanian, my mother tongue, after years of feeling it slip away. At the same time, I was pursuing a PhD in language education, asking what can be done to creatively support youth heritage language maintenance in our communities. My research drew on poetic inquiry, community arts-based research, multiliteracies, and sociocultural theory (if you’re interested, you can download the dissertation for free here!). I enjoyed exploring how bilingual poetry, as well as other artistic modes like self-portraiture, protest art, illustration, photography, video, animation, and painting, can help us sustain our languages and ways of knowing that are at risk of being lost. I brought a lot of what I learned to my first collection of poems.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

“From the moment you try to impose a path on a poet, you pave the way for dictatorships,” Raúl Zurita recently said in an interview. I don’t have a prescriptive role for a writer, but a task—to pay close attention, especially to the things that are disappearing, ignored, forgotten, or silenced. To notice connections that others might miss and make them visible (for example, the connection between preserving our planet’s biological diversity and linguistic diversity). In a world of speed, distraction, neverending atrocities—a single poem can slow us down. A poem in another language, or in translation, can slow us down, even more. It’s incredible what we learn when we slow down and pay attention.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Editors are essential. Writing may begin in solitude, but books are not made alone. I owe an enormous mulțumesc to the editors and mentors who have helped me see both the strengths and areas for growth in my work. In the acknowledgements to Descântec For My Split Tongue, I thank my writing coach, Tara Skurtu, for her eagle eye, her steadfast guidance, and for being the poem-midwife to so many lines in the collection. My editor at Anstruther Books/Palimpsest Press, Jim Johnstone, also helped shape the manuscript with his tremendous care and insight. A good editor doesn't impose a vision on the work. They help the work become more fully itself. The process can be challenging at times, especially when it asks you to let go of a poem, stanza, line, or word you're attached to, but I've always found those conversations generative.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Derek Walcott taught us to aim for “ambition without conceit.” It's a lesson I've never forgotten, in both writing and in life.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I’m a work-from-home and stay-at-home mom, so in the last three years, my writing routine has looked something like this: breastfeed, eat breakfast, chase my son, read, play, sketch, walk, take notes in a small notebook, breastfeed some more, cook lunch, nap, dream, breastfeed, read, translate, and then, once he's asleep for the night, try to write some poems (while breastfeeding throughout the night). That's why this interview took me three weeks to complete, rob lol

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I turn towards translation. I like what Canadian poet-translator George McWhirter says: “if inspiration in your own work falters, you can turn to translation to keep your writing tuned up.” I couldn’t agree more. Translating Romanian poet Liliana Ursu has been an endless source of inspiration for my own poems.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Romania: scent of zambile, lalele, narcise (hyacinths, tulips, daffodils)

Canada: spruce after snowfall, and wet earth as the snow begins to melt

Sicily: the scent of posidonia drying on a beach, slightly sulfurous.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I worked at the Art Gallery of Alberta for seven years, so paintings, sculptures, installations, photography, and collage have shaped my poems just as much as books have. I was also thrilled that Palimpsest Press welcomed several of my own collages into my debut collection.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I love this question. There’s a constellation of writers, artists, researchers, and educators whose work greatly shaped my translingual thinking in the book. I name them all in my acknowledgements section, because I think it’s very important to name your sources of knowledge and inspiration.

I also think it’s important to put Edmonton on the map. The multilingual writing emerging from this city is extraordinary, as evidenced by the poems, plays, essays, and children’s books of writers like Naomi McIlwraith, Pierrette Requier, Medgine Mathurin, Mila Bongco, Leilei Chen, Sophie Gareau Brennan, Luciana Erregue-Sacchi, Anna Marie Sewell, Gian Marco Visconti, Nermeen Youssef, Iman Mersal, Maria Teodora Barbu, Adriana Boffa, Anita Lafferty, Peter Midgley, Candice Joy Oliva, and more. I feel so lucky to have learned from all of these writers and thinkers.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

It's my dream to one day attend (or even participate in!) the Festival de Poesía de Medellín in Colombia, Repubblica delle Idee in Italy, and Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad.

I'd also love to figure out how to make our literary magazine and creative hub, The Polyglot, financially sustainable. After ten years of building it, I'd love to see it thrive for decades to come.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

My Grade 9 teacher, Mrs. Underhill, almost convinced me to become a spy. She thought my love of languages, combined with my tendency to both hide and reveal, would make me perfectly suited to work for CSIS.

I like to think poetry turned out to be a close cousin. I get to listen closely, eavesdrop in five languages, move constantly between different cities, and decide what to keep hidden and what to bring into the light.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I've always held different jobs, often simultaneously, including art educator, festival organizer, lecturer, and research assistant. But writing has never felt like a career choice so much as an essential part of who I am. It's the way I make sense of the world and my place within it.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The last great book I read was The Red We Silk by Nicole Lachat, an Edmonton-born poet of Swiss and Peruvian descent. Lachat is a divine alchemist who can take any human experience—sorrow, love, shame, grief, despair—and transform it into something of profound belleza y bondad.

Being a toddler parent, I have not seen a great film in a few years, but I look forward to rekindling my passion for cinema soon.

19 - What are you currently working on?

This summer, I'm working on submitting my Italian and Romanian poetry manuscripts to publishers, as well as finding a home for my translation of Romanian poet Liliana Ursu's work.

I'm also hoping to finally buckle down and write / illustrate a bilingual children's book!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Adriana Oniță, Descântec for my Split Tongue: poems

Uită-te afară. Your balcony in Edmonton is a cinema, the undulating refinery flame glows toată zina prin casă—your body a ginger machine. Tomorrow, cănd te trezeşti, the table will be rearranged with tulips, on 106th Street, or Via Giglio, or Strada Odăi. Before this room, or the many rooms you left: bread sliced and spread with vinete de la Jilava. For the next few days, you won’t empty your pockets on the shelves. You will keep the drapes open, tiptoe on the rub, recut the tulip stems. English has taught you how to pick your own bones clean. You discard your mother’s tongue and call it forgetting. (“A DERETICA”)

The full-length poetry debut by Edmonton-based poet, artist, educator, translator and researcher Adriana Oniță is Descântec for my Split Tongue: poems (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2026), a collection of poems that sits amid and between two languages and cultures, even as the author feels her Romanian slip slowly away. “I should have begun by saying / that I lost my mother tongue.” begins the poem “LIMBA MATERNĂ,” early on in the collection, “I know what you are thinking. / How can you lose something / that lives inside of you, unless / you chose to live languageless? // Forgive me, loss never occurs / on purpose. Think of the way / you lose a loved one, or faith.” Her poems speak of a loss still in-progress, with almost a call-and-response element to a number of these poems: offering a line in Romanian that follows in English translation, almost as a kind of reclamation of her mother tongue, but one that sits aside this more recent English comprehension. The poems work to reclaim and, perhaps, to recontextualize, offering alongside this life built fresh in Canada’s prairies. As the poem “PENTRU A FACE ŞI DESFACE / FOR DOING AND UNDOING” writes:

Fă rai din ce ai.
Make heaven from what you’ve got. 

Grăbeşte-te încet.
Hurry slowly. 

Am carat apă la fântână.
I carried water to the well.

The way her two languages, her translations, are set against each other, it suggests not simply to replicate or repeat in English, but composed and translated in a way attempting to shape and articulate that space where both Romanian and English might comfortably meet, within the comfort of her own divided imagation, perhaps. Accompanied by full-colour collages, including those built with photographs from the family archive, Oniță writes to articulate, to claim, to re-claim, setting up a new foundation from which to finally build. I am curious to see what might follow.

 

Spotlight series #95 : Adriana Oniță

The ninety-fifth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță [photo credit: Shawna Lemay].

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes and Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

new from above/ground press : Houbolt, Koss, Robinson, Dardis, Tucker, Oniță + Carr/mclennan

; But Then I Thought, by Kyla Houbolt $5 ; A PANDEMIC INVENTORY, SPRING-SUMMER 2020, BROOKLYN NY, by Zane Koss $5 ; Between the Lakes, by Ben Robinson $5 ; with the lakes, by Colin Dardis $5 ; The Last Horse / Prologue, by Aaron Tucker $5 ; Misremembered Proverbs, by Adriana Oniță $5 ; river / estuaries, by Julie Carr and rob mclennan $6 ;

AND DID YOU SEE THAT JASON CHRISTIE WON THE 2023 bpNICHOL CHAPBOOK AWARD IN NOVEMBER FOR HIS 2022 ABOVE/GROUND PRESS TITLE?  (second printing now available, as well as a Jason Christie bundle); and groundwork: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023) is now available! see my introduction over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics!

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material; see the previous batch of backlist from October-November 2023 here;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
November-December 2023
as the final batch of the above/ground press 30th anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each
and there's still time to subscribe for 2024!

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Forthcoming chapbooks by Julia Polyck-O'Neill, Sacha Archer, Dale Tracy, Melissa Eleftherion, Kyle Flemmer, Saba Pakdel, Lydia Unsworth, Katie Ebbitt, Russell Carisse, Micah Ballard, Cary Fagan, Amanda Deutch, Kyla Houbolt, Gary Barwin, Blunt Research Group, Phil Hall + Steven Ross Smith, Peter Myers, Terri Witek, Pete Smith and Angela Caporaso (among others, most likely); what else might 2024 bring?