Poetry was shining as bright as the stars in the Leitner Family Planetarium. Acclaimed visual poet, Monica Ong presented work from her forthcoming collection, Planetaria, in an immersive poetry reading she custom-designed for the planetarium experience: a show mixing poetry, science, and star gazing for about 100 attendees.
"It is said that when gazing up at the night sky, we are glimpsing the ghost light of stars that have come and gone, the same way we bask in the after light of our ancestors, turning to them to guide us through the unknown.
Rewriting the sky from a female perspective, Monica Ong invites us into the intimate cosmology of Planetaria, utilizing the visual language of astronomy to explore the precarious territories of motherhood, women in science, and diaspora identity. This collection examines the power struggles that myth-making elicits through the alchemy of text and image hybrids.
Poems read during the event
The Way of Milk
The Purple Forbidden Enclosure
Star Gazer
The White Tiger
The Dark Side of the Moon
Her Gaze: A Tribute to Caroline Herschel
Planetaria invites us into the Chinese night sky where stars are organized into asterisms, which are smaller than the constellations you may know from the Greco-Roman sky. One of the most well-known 13th century sky maps is the Soochow Astronomical Chart which contains 283 asterisms made up of 1,565 individual stars.
The creative team
Concept and realization: Monica Ong
Production: Florian Carle
Planetarium Control: Iver Warburton
Event photos by Tom Virgin
Poems read at this event, and many more, can be found in Monica Ong's book: Planetaria: Visual Poetry. With a foreword by John Yau, these poems move through constellations, across ancestral skies, turning wide-eyed insomnia into nocturnes in search of home. This full color collection includes gallery views of the poems as installations, fine press and interactive works, giving full expression to Ong’s interdisciplinary practice of visual poetry. If poetry and astronomy were to throw an art party, this one welcomes audiences across disciplines and cultures to imagine new cosmographies where everyone belongs.
More information about the book can be found here