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

 

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

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

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

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

I would 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 poetry collection, experimental memoir, visual poetry assemblage and fine art catalogue. Planetaria is a book on family, constellations, loss and storytelling, wrapped in a visual array of wistful gestures and grounded expression. If you aren’t aware of 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 Silent Anatomies (Tucson AZ: Kore Press, 2015), selected by Joy Harjo as winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in poetry, with further work appearing in numerous 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. Planetaria is swirling with full-colour gloss, as Ong collages text on maps of constellations and an archive of family photographs that weave stellar cartographies and mythologies across a tapestry of storytelling, family story and song. Her gestures are heartfelt, visual and far-reaching, ever looking to the stars to hold what the ground allows. As she writes: “This interactive poem takes the form of a lunar volvelle. As the moon reveals its ever-changing shape, so too does the poem that radiates from the volvelle’s heart. Fear not. During the full moon, my father’s mother will watch over you.”

I find it interesting that Ong includes a back cover blurb by Los Angeles-based poet Victoria Chang, as the pieces here are reminiscent of the interplay between the collage-visuals and prose stretches of Chang’s own stunning non-fiction project, 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 both volumes, there is a particular collaboration between the visuals and the text, each one reacting to the other to create something that sits amid and surrounds them both, wrapped into a single, sustained image or narrative thread. The images that Ong collages and employs here are not there to accompany her text, but exist as one half of a larger structure along with those texts, offering different structures and purpose from piece to piece, from visual poems to what appear like large visual art displays to more subtle blends of image and words. While other contemporary visual poets might be attending smaller, even sequential, works that interplay visual and text, such as Canadian poets Kate Siklosi, Gregory Betts, Gary Barwin or Erín Moure, Ong’s Planetaria is an expansive, full-bodied book-held installation, a structure my dear spouse suggested was closer to the blend of collaged image and text of what British Columbia-based writer Nick Bantock began with his debut novel Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence (Raincoast Books, 1991), the larger narrative structure of the work including visual and physical elements, although Ong’s doesn’t share the design and narrative (convoluted) intensity of Bantock’s novels. And while this collection does include a startling array of visual 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 text and image structures, with much of the collection built out of works that work to interplay and collage the elements of visual and text, but more in way of conversation or counterpoint than as a sequence of individual pieces where one form isn’t able to be removed without the whole structure collapsing (whereas this might 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. One is an observation. The other, a polite indictment. She preferred to arrange her studio against the laws of symmetry, her way of saying up yours to Confucius and his man-pandering precepts. No matching pillows, tilted walls, her father’s books all perfect bound yet bent like a wormwood granny’s feet.

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

Mathematics were just foreplay. There is nothing wrong with being easy. Any man can scribble odes to flatter a goddess of the moon. She turned her garden into a laboratory to decipher 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 endless ether. There are those whose greatness grows in shadow, whose outer limits the spotting of blood cannot contain.

 

John Yau, Tell It Slant

 

Chinatown Blues

Don’t keep saying poetry makes nothing happen
I am not trying to be your surrogate chaplain

I am going to grow up and be a hatchet man
Doing the sharp and shiny thing—being the best I can

Don’t tell me the wood is far too green or yellow
Or that Mr. Frost—protector of fences—is a jolly good fellow

I am still going to grow up and tell it slant
Don’t even try and tell me I can’t

Stop reminding me I have to watch what I say
Be polite or I will have to pay and pay

I am still going to grow and be a hatchet man
Doing the sharp and shiny thing—being the very best I can

I’m enjoying American poet and editor John Yau’s latest collection, Tell It Slant (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2023), only the second I’ve encountered of his wide array of myriad titles, following Genghis Chan on Drums (Omnidawn, 2021) [see my review of such here]. There is such a smart and playful way that Yau twists and twirls expectation and perception, plucking Emily Dickinson’s infamous line to turn, as the back cover offers, “a racist slur (slanted eyes) into the sign by which we recognize the trustworthy phenomenologist.” Recently I was discussing part of an essay by Canadian poet Don McKay that suggested that stand-up comedy and lyric poetry (which only applies to a particular kind of stand-up against a particular kind of lyric poem, naturally) are deeply related: how the familiar is offered as set-up, with the alternate, unexpected and fresh perspective at the end, which becomes the “a-ha” moment of the lyric, and where the joke originates (of course I can’t recall where this sits in McKay’s books). “One day I will wake up and my hair turned white / and I am no longer Chinese,” Yau writes, to open the poem “Memories of Charles Street, Boston,” “I want to ask my mother about this change in my appearance / but she has been dead longer than I have been alive [.]”

John Yau cearly delights in reworking perception against the familiar, even while examining more serious subject matter. Yau writes through Charles Baudelaire, Thomas De Quincey, Philip K. Dick, old films, paintings and Wang Wei across an examination of lyric form and prose structures that shift enormously, from clipped lyric narratives and point-form stretches, carved diamond shapes, sonnet sequences and extended essays, all with a level of serious play, invention and flourish. “To make every devourer wish life could be written in reverse,” he writes, to close the first poem in the sequence “Li Shangyin Enters Manhattan,” “Do you know whose glossolalia you will be speaking in today [.]” In certain ways, Yau is the master of the long thread—how to get there from here—holding an idea slightly turned and seeing it through as far as might be possible. His perspectives are turned, ever so slight, but beyond what others might be able to see, or connect, without the benefit of Yau’s unique sight. Or, as he offers, as part of the opening of the second poem in the same sequence: “The greatest poet in Chinese history / Is a mulberry tree on which poems / Are sprinkled in ash, ink, or snow [.]”

John Yau, Genghis Chan on Drums

 

O Pin Yin Sonnet (15)

We’re not talking about Asians; we’re talking about China
It is smart business to name a restaurant chain after a cuddly bear
Who happens to be a vegetarian, but it is another thing
To go big-game hunting in the African savanna
I would just as soon turn a panda into a huggy coat or hat.
Importing kudu horns or making a zebra into a rug—
This is real and different. For one thing, it’s permanent,
Not just a bowl of green weeds and brown meat scrape
Gobbled, wolved, or slurped up or jammed down with sticks
Standing beside a dead giraffe that you shot on a hot day
Proves something about the depth of your character
I respect a man or woman that displays big-game trophies
We had Teddy Roosevelt, his Big Stick policy and Rough Riders
What does China have: old men with canes and fallen zippers

It is impossible not to delight in the near two hundred pages of American poet John Yau’s latest, Genghis Chan on Drums (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2021), a book that follows nearly a dozen poetry collections across more than forty years, as well as numerous chapbooks, works of fiction, criticism, collaborations and monographs. This is the first of his titles I’ve gone through, and I’m immediately struck by the clarity of the direct statements in his poems, especially the ways in which Yau returns years’ worth of racist comments, microaggressions and injustices back in the most powerful ways possible. The poem “On Being Told that I Don’t Look and Act Chinese,” opens: “I am deeply grateful for your good opinion / I am honestly indignant / I am, I confess, a little discouraged / I am inclined to agree with you / I am incredulous / I am in a chastened mood / I am far more grieved than I can tell you / I am naturally overjoyed [.]” There is a confidence and a strength here, one he knows when and how to play, push or hold back, from a poet who clearly knows exactly what it is he’s doing, and what tools he’s working with.

Structured via nine sections of poems, plus a prose poem in prologue, and two poems in epilogue, Yau appears to be engaged in multiple conversations, including a section of poems in which he responds to the previous administration, including the former American President, responding to history and culture as it occurs. “There are no words to express / the horrible hour that happened,” he writes, to open “The President’s Third Telegram,” “Journalists, like all fear, should be / attacked while doing their jobs [.]” Weaving in elements of culture and current events, much of which touch upon larger issues of fearmongering and racist dog-whistles, Yau’s is a very human and considered lyric sense of fairness and justice, composing poems that push back against dangerous rhetoric, outdated or deliberately obscured language and racist ideas and ideologies. In his own way, Yau works to counter the ways in which language is weaponized against marginalized groups, attempting to renew human consideration by showcasing how inhuman and destructive language has become. “We regret that we are unable to correct the matter of your disappointment,” he writes, as part of “Choose Two of the Following,” “We quaff mugs of delight while recounting the details of your latest inconvenience [.]”

Structurally, Yau appears to favour the extended suite: individual self-contained poems each sharing a title, although numbered in sequence, from the nineteen numbered “O Pin Yin Sonnet” poems, the eight “The Philosopher” poems to five “A Painter’s Thoughts,” each grouped together at different points in the collection. Given his lengthy publishing history, it would make sense that there are elements of this collection that extend further what he’s worked through previously, and there are points at which poems included here very much do feel an extension of a conversation I might not have encountered at the beginning. The most obvious suggestions of Yau working an ongoing series of conversations being, of course, how the nineteen “O Pin Yin Sonnets” begin their numbering at “10,” or how poet Monica Youn infers in her back cover blurb that the character/”alter-ego” Genghis Chan is one that Yau has utilized previously. Throughout, Yau engages in multiple and ongoing conversations, it would seem, from culture to politics to other writers, such as the first of the paired epilogue poems, “Nursery Song,” subtitled “(After Sean Bonney),” paying tribute to both the late British poet and activist, as well as engaging with some of Bonney’s own ongoing concerns. As the poem begins:

Don’t say “pandemic lockdown”
Say Fuck the rich/their private island getaways
Say Fuck their Aspen lodges/stocked with climate-controlled volcanoes
and children named after weather stations and rare cheeses

Don’t say “clubbed and beaten”
Say Fuck clubbing and slumming
Say Fuck following and liking 

Don’t say “assortment of pretty much everything you can imagine,
at a loss for words, beyond your wildest dreams”
Don’t say “quartz countertops, home theater, private cul-de-sac, second getaway”
Say Fuck the rich, their carbon footprint, their dinosaur ways