Re-circling the Garden

Feria is a Latin ecclesiastical term for an ordinary day of the week, i.e., a day that is not a festival (OED). “Feria” also, in Spanish, refers to a “fair.” This book centres on a park that is/was a fair/unfair ground. Clever and layered! The title’s suggested equivalence between feria and the compound poempark immediately points to a working rather than festive or leisurely understanding of both poem and park. Vancouver’s Hastings Park provides Oana Avasilichioaei’s frame while she destabilizes notions of geography, of ownership, and of the ornamentation by which both poem and park are marked. Further, highlighting makers and the made engages readers in the repeating labours that comprise both.

The poem that precedes Avasilichioaei’s prologue claims:

origin is unoriginal
not a beginning
          simply a point
in space crossed   
      and recrossed with stories

Reinforcing the travail of origin stories, she writes in the “Prologue”: “Branch, footpath and stanza model its nature.” The crossings and recrossings reveal themselves starkly: first, bones of slaughtered cattle writhe beneath the cement floor under the red barn that might have been the barracks or the Ferris wheel (25), and while her carousel horses cannot be dated precisely (30), their provenance as prisoners’ carvings raised goosebumps on my arm.

It is erasures of history that require us to do the work of unlayering and examining origins. Avasilichioaei sifts these from early twentieth-century texts detailing the history of the park as exhibition, and chronicles the shifting “otherness” embedded in the morphing freak shows, complete with requisite spectators. Freak becomes immigrant becomes assimilated but remains “other,” blanketing origins. She then rounds this sweeping section back to the unsettlement of the West by the forces unleashed by Columbus. This de rigueur reference to 1492 may be the only relatively predictable, and perhaps romantic, turn taken by this poet even as she queries the tumult of its impact.

Avasilichioaei circles the “garden” in two texts. In an extension of a line of inquiry from Lisa Robertson’s Rousseau’s Boat, in sometimes lanky sentences and anaphora, she probes the particular formal garden, “Il Giardino Italiano,” built by post European W.W. II Italian immigrants; these were the first urban Canadians who inhabited parks as vital family living spaces while they constructed the infrastructures of cities. Then, in “Momiji Garden,” Avasilichioaei takes up the Japanese garden in a continuing inquiry into the multiple tasks of commemoration. In spare lines, with words ordered, reordered, cultivated, she re/creates the tasks of the park (81).

easted from this
western pond, east-
ed past the stones         (Symbols
we collect and are
collected into we

unresolved we breach)

Nodding to the “moderns” in distinctly postmodern text and sensibility, in a fourth short section Avasilichioaei deepens the need for origins, for stories of land and water, and takes up the Orpheus myth to age our new world sensibilities, to knock us back on the heels of our short and ignoble histories: “So excavate. Go!/ Excavate!” (91) in order to embody “as history evenings/ into my cuffs    throat   pockets”; “your smile   holding us covenant   saddened into story” (98) and the history re/presents itself always. Lovers languishing in the park: “(enthroned we covet the park)/this is our arena   this our bullfight” (99).

Jorie Graham, the American poet, who grew up largely in Rome, has written of thinking as a child about what was going on below the “current humans” (72) in various historical frames, during the eighteenth century, the Renaissance, the Medieval period and down to the Romans and the pre-Romans. She has contemplated her felt capacity to peel through history, using the tools of an extensive classical education. However, as a nursing mother in Iowa city, she found “something like a floor” close to the surface, a new blockage where she “couldn't keep going down imaginatively”(74).

Oana Avasilichioaei probes that floor and has recast it as a doughy palimpsest for a wider and thicker notion of history in these site-specific poems. They loop through history unpeeling geography, separating what remains present from what is erased but lurks, shaping what we take, knowingly and unknowingly, from the disappeared. Graham could conceive of more layers, perhaps, if North Americans were able to grasp wider histories, to trace the churning geography of killing, human and animal, followed by the domesticating installations of fair, garden and park. These phases of refiguring the land and its inhabitants require a reading practice: overlapping and unwrapping the relations of ornamentation so that concepts of fair/unfair emerge. Avasilichioaei provides some data points with which to consider such displacement; her poems regard sedimental history in the mouth, which I am admiring deeply.

As I considered feria, coincidentally I began to read about the American artist Julie Mehretu’s gigantic “Mural” in Lower Manhattan (a controversial work, though perhaps appropriately inaccessible to mere mortals given its commission by and installation in the new lobby of now infamous Goldman Sachs). This visual artist layers abstract shapes and colours upon historical maps, trade routes, and architectural drawings using silica and acrylic spray to create depths that require a close viewing. It struck me that this work might be an accurate parallel for the work of reading feria.  In my mind’s eye in both cases, I yearn to be able to grasp and parse multiple layers simultaneously, to deepen these destabilizations and fill in the unfillable erasures, thereby to see inside wider histories.
 

(You can see a short video of Oana Avasilichioaei reading the prologue of feria online here.)