Monica Ong is a visual poet and author of the new book Planetaria. With a focus on family and diaspora as well as astronomy, the poems in Planetaria are tactile—not just visual but multidimensional. The book features a poem that takes the form of a wheel that’s viewed through a View-Master toy, a poem with locks of real hair atop text, and intricately letterpressed, interactive poems. Each work asks for multiple looks, creating a rich experience as the reader navigates Ong’s creative vision. C-VILLE talked with Ong about her inspiration and creative process.
C-VILLE: In addition to family photos and Chinese star charts, Planetaria is shaped by science, from its epigram by a physicist to a poem in tribute to astronomer Caroline Herschel. How do you describe your relationship to science as a poet?
Monica Ong: I view science with awe and regard scientists with deep admiration for what they do. Although I was somewhat intimidated by STEM subjects as a young student, poetry provides me with a space to get acquainted with the things that scare me but I am mysteriously drawn to.
What I love about astronomy is how this cosmic perspective encourages me to zoom back and embrace a much broader long-term perspective, which has helped me navigate these strange times. I am inspired by how scientists test the stories we tell about the world with meticulous experiments and are willing to follow the evidence into new territory, even if it means overturning or giving up their attachments to long-held beliefs.
It takes courage to follow the truth, especially if it exists outside of one’s comfort zone or inherited framework. You have to be brave to go somewhere new.
Family and tradition—as well as breaking with tradition—are significant themes in this collection. Describe your process of exploring family photos.
I often think of our ancestors as early cosmonauts who gave up the world they knew to brave the great unknown in search of a better life. I found myself gravitating to images of my parents or grandparents during these big life changes, often collaging those scenes with astronomical diagrams and imagery.
Our families were very much like a gathering of asterisms, seemingly close in proximity within photos, but often living great distances away from one another, due to war, due to survival, due to the pursuit of dreams.
I like to look at the scientific language in astronomy textbooks for interesting syntax while also free-writing responses to these photos and then weaving these texts into the images with design. It’s in the process of asking my family about the photos that fascinating stories they’ve never told finally get to be uncovered.
Was there a typical process for creating each work, or was each a unique project when it came to combining text, images, and other elements?
As the artist Ben Shahn once said, “Form is the shape of content,” which is to say that whatever the poem asks of me, I make. From poem to poem, I am thinking about its context of reading and how my decisions about a poem’s material, syntax, scale, or form are in service to the reader’s experience.
The most complex poem that I designed was the “Star Gazer,” which takes the form of a planisphere. By writing verses to connect selected asterism from the Chinese night sky, this piece allows readers to see the stars on a desired date in a manner that reveals a poem among the stars. It is a poem that changes over the course of the seasons such that the poem you may see on a summer birthday will be different than one you may offer a loved on a winter’s night.
What went into your decision to divide the book based on moon phases?
I like how grouping the poems into moon phases allows more breathing room in the pacing of these works as a collection. Visual poetry can be dense in how it engages readers on multiple levels. Thus, it was important to consider a kind of close reading that is not rushed and tilted towards the expansion of time and space in order to reflect back the cosmic perspective that the poems seek to live in.
When you give readings, are there visual elements that you incorporate in-person?
I love giving multi-media readings of this work to show images of the visual poems in process and as gallery installations, as well as planetary footage from NASA and historical portraits of some of the women scientists who inspired many of the poems. Thanks to the Yale Quantum Institute, I even custom-designed a poetry reading for the Yale Leitner Observatory & Planetarium where I utilized the 360-degree dome to display the Chinese star system that inspired many of the constellation maps in this collection.
Creating this immersive cocoon of shared wonder in celebration of motherhood, women in science, and family diaspora also brought audiences together across disciplines and geographies. Doing this work has shown me time and again that despite the manufactured illusions of difference, we really are just made of star dust.
