Planetaria: Visual Poetry by Monica Ong, with a Foreword by John Yau

 

At the beginning of hermarvelous book, Planetaria, Monica Ong declares her intention with anepigram taken from Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese-American particle andexperimental physicist, who was known as the ‘Queen of Nuclear Research’:

The main stumbling blockin the way of any progress is and always has been unimpeachable tradition.

Instead of aligning herwriting with an established, avant-garde agenda, Ong has defined a fresh trajectorythat arises out of living in the diaspora while being aware that we inhabit an expandinguniverse. By incorporating family photographs, Chinese star charts, astrologytexts, scientific diagrams, unwritten and neglected histories and biographies,and symbolic language, she is able to synthesize aspects of the microcosmic andmacrocosmic into something original and disruptive.

Ong’s visual poemsreplete with charged language expose the obstacles shaping an individual’slife. Motivated by a propelling desire to dissolve the constraints of literarytradition, gender bias, family history, and cultural beliefs, she hasintervened in classical Chinese texts and written shaped poems in praise ofwomen scientists, always making something new (John Yau, “Foreword”)

Iwould say you absolutely have to get yourself a copy of Planetaria: Visual Poetry by Monica Ong, with a Foreword by John Yau (Trumbull CT: Proxima Vera,2025), a stunningly-intricate blend of visuals and text as simultaneous poetrycollection, experimental memoir, visual poetry assemblage and fine art catalogue.Planetaria is a book on family, constellations, loss and storytelling, wrappedin a visual array of wistful gestures and grounded expression. If you aren’t awareof Connecticut-based American poet and artist Monica Ong [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], she is also the author of the poetry debut SilentAnatomies (Tucson AZ: Kore Press, 2015), selected by Joy Harjo as winner ofthe Kore Press First Book Award in poetry, with further work appearing innumerous journals including Scientific American, Poetry Magazine,and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024), among other places. Planetariais swirling with full-colour gloss, as Ong collages text on maps of constellationsand an archive of family photographs that weave stellar cartographies andmythologies across a tapestry of storytelling, family story and song. Her gesturesare heartfelt, visual and far-reaching, ever looking to the stars to hold whatthe ground allows. As she writes: “This interactive poem takes the form of alunar volvelle. As the moon reveals its ever-changing shape, so too does thepoem that radiates from the volvelle’s heart. Fear not. During the full moon,my father’s mother will watch over you.”

Ifind it interesting that Ong includes a back cover blurb by Los Angeles-based poet Victoria Chang, as the pieces here are reminiscent of the interplaybetween the collage-visuals and prose stretches of Chang’s own stunning non-fictionproject, the deeply intimate Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2021) [see my review of such here], a book that also writes of memory, history and mentors. Through bothvolumes, there is a particular collaboration between the visuals and the text,each one reacting to the other to create something that sits amid and surroundsthem both, wrapped into a single, sustained image or narrative thread. The imagesthat Ong collages and employs here are not there to accompany her text, butexist as one half of a larger structure along with those texts, offeringdifferent structures and purpose from piece to piece, from visual poems to whatappear like large visual art displays to more subtle blends of image and words.While other contemporary visual poets might be attending smaller, evensequential, works that interplay visual and text, such as Canadian poets Kate Siklosi, Gregory Betts, Gary Barwin or Erín Moure, Ong’s Planetaria isan expansive, full-bodied book-held installation, a structure my dear spouse suggestedwas closer to the blend of collaged image and text of what BritishColumbia-based writer Nick Bantock began with his debut novel Griffin andSabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence (Raincoast Books, 1991), the largernarrative structure of the work including visual and physical elements,although Ong’s doesn’t share the design and narrative (convoluted) intensity ofBantock’s novels. And while this collection does include a startling array ofvisual poems, I wouldn’t call this a collection of visual poems per se,as Ong’s visual poems are but part of a much larger and complex multitude of textand image structures, with much of the collection built out of works that workto interplay and collage the elements of visual and text, but more in way ofconversation or counterpoint than as a sequence of individual pieces where one formisn’t able to be removed without the whole structure collapsing (whereas thismight be me simply splitting hairs, admittedly). This is absolutely beautiful,and narratively complex. As the poem “WOMEN’S PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE” writes:

Odd number. Odd girl. Oneis an observation. The other, a polite indictment. She preferred to arrange herstudio against the laws of symmetry, her way of saying up yours to Confuciusand his man-pandering precepts. No matching pillows, tilted walls, her father’sbooks all perfect bound yet bent like a wormwood granny’s feet.

Imagine a woman’scalculations opening up the sky, the sun’s orbit but a mole on the lip of solarclustered nipple. How she spilled the milk from the glass of her astronomer eyeknowing it would feed another hunger in another womb of time.

Mathematics were justforeplay. There is nothing wrong with being easy. Any man can scribble odes toflatter a goddess of the moon. She turned her garden into a laboratory todecipher the secret turning of the stars. Behind the ecliptic strung up crystal,she glimpsed her face in the lunar mirror’s gleam.

Infinite planets. Her endlessether. There are those whose greatness grows in shadow, whose outer limits thespotting of blood cannot contain.