Proxima Vera, 2025
Interview with Monica Ong on Planetaria — April 30, 2025
Monica Ong is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press, 2015). A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong brings a designer’s eye to experimental writing with her hybrid image-poems and installations that surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. Her poetry can be found in Scientific American, ctrl+v, and Poetry Magazine, and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024). She has been awarded residencies most recently at Directangle Press, the Studios at MassMoCA, Marble House Project, Yaddo, Millay Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation. Ong’s most recent series of astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and is the basis of her new book Planetaria (Proxima Vera, 2025). You can find her fine press visual poetry editions and literary art objects in over fifty distinguished institutional collections worldwide. In 2024, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow.
Christopher Nelson: First, let me say congratulations on a beautiful and inventive book. When you consider Planetaria in the context of your other works, what is unique about the project? And are there any stylistic or esthetic concerns that remain constant for you from project to project?
Monica Ong: Thank you kindly for spending time with this work, Chris. While my earlier work grew out of a series of family history interviews and archives driven by questions about my own diaspora history, this new collection extends its gaze towards what new futures we can imagine. Developing this work during early motherhood fueled curiosity about what it means to re-negotiate “unimpeachable traditions” or inherited ideas about identity, gender, and even poetry.
Formally, you can say that my work is often in conversation with many types of visual language, from scientific diagrams, information design, to graphic design. Silent Anatomies made use of medical ephemera as a framework for examining the cultural silences of the body. You can say that there was a shift from the microcosm to macrocosm when I moved towards the visual language of astronomy as the site for my line of questioning in Planetaria, which seeks to reimagine the sky from a female perspective.
I leverage strategies of cognitive design to invite readers into a slower, closer kind of reading that is not always tethered to linearity or traditional structure, but instead is open to collaborative improvisation. How readers might read my poems will often be different than what my own habits allow and usually better.
Nelson: In Planetaria there is a conflation of celestial phenomena—constellations, moon phases—with family history and ideation around family, like daughterhood. What brought you to marrying those two subjects, and what did it enable you to do?
Ong: I love this question so much. While studying early star maps and vintage astronomy textbooks, I noticed themes of male conquest not only enshrined in the figures and stories of the stars but also in how this race to “discover” the unknown has often framed the early work of western male explorers and scientists with the “hero’s journey,” while unfortunately obscuring the concerns and contributions of marginalized participants.
As a daughter of immigrants, I have always thought of our ancestors as the cosmonauts of our family, who braved the unknown during their escape from geopolitical strife in search of a better life. My work is curious about those who were the “firsts” in their generation to make their own discoveries, to traverse social norms in pursuit of questions too large for the existing conventions of their time. Whether it’s women scientists, migrants, mothers and/or daughters, it comes back to whether we can extend our gaze to not only see their stories, but also recognize them as heroic journeys.
Humans can only see one side of the moon from earth due to tidal locking, but when scientific innovation led to technology that was able to glimpse the other side, our perspective of the moon expanded. We are capable of transcending seemingly impossible constraints. This is why I felt compelled to make a poem about women’s labor using a map of the dark side of the moon - I really wanted the exercise of reading to also serve as an opportunity to interrogate the gaze. It’s a kind of questioning that is not easily achieved by the poem’s words alone or images alone, but resides in its alchemy of elements that asks the reader to notice how cultural habits shape the narratives we construct from cognition. This is the power of visual poetry.
Nelson: I love what you said about a multiplicity of reading possibilities resulting from an alchemy of the visual and textual. That there isn't a single or certain way to read some of your works makes them both fun and challenging, and there is a real pleasure for me in knowing that my reading experience with, say, "Diaspora Nova," in which the text follows orbits or parabolas and has a spiraling effect and an horizontal-vertical tension, could be different next time I read it. In this way your poems are like an open field. Yet often you've printed the traditional text—read left to right and top to bottom—after the visual poem. Will you tell us about that decision?
Ong: I appreciate your astute observation on the considerations of the reading experience. Over the years, I’ve found a tension that exists for a spectrum of readers. Some do not want the “transcription” of the visual poem on the same spread because they enjoy the discovery of their own reading based on encountering the visual poem first. As such, in most cases I present the visual poem as originally designed first and then follow with a kind of transcript behind that page. These readers tend to relish the challenge and collaboration of being able to come away with their own rendering of the poem based on how they choose to wander through the poem.
At the same time, I offer transcription to provide accessibility and legibility for those who do not necessarily want to “decipher” how to read the poem. The transcriptions reflect one possible reading of the poem through my own reading tendencies but are certainly not limited to it. There are definitely people in my life who can’t stand not easily knowing how to read some of the poems, so I think of it as a gentle way to guide them in so that they are more likely to stay for the journey. These decisions speak to the user experience (UX) designer in me trying to create an experience that feels welcoming to a broad range of readers.
Nelson: Many of your poems are not "simply" visual poems (i.e., a static 2D art object) but are functional, dynamic art objects, like "The Star Gazer" and "Lunar Volvelle." Do you consider these as a kind of tool as well, as if for divination or other functions?
Ong: These interactive handheld poems arose from wanting to create poems that bring people together. Particularly for “The Star Gazer,” I liked the idea that someone could read a unique poem to a friend on their birthday or for an auspicious or reflective occasion. It’s a way of connecting one person to another as well as to the stars, both micro and macrocosm.
Based on a map of the Soochow Astronomical Chart of 1193, I began with my favorite asterisms, usually star clusters with lyrically interesting names, and then wrote original verses to connect them in varying directions. To read the planisphere, the reader would align the disc to the desired date and hour to see what stars will appear at that time and then allow the eyes to wander across the sky to read the poem revealed by the star map. As the seasons change, so do the stars and therefore the poem, and because one reader's eyes may move differently than another's, the planisphere offers an abundance of possible poems throughout the course of the year.
Aside from connection and improvisation, I also like making poems into interactive forms to present a different way to pay attention and slow down for a closer reading. It’s about creating experiences of poetry that can be joyful, intimate, and exploratory.
Nelson: Are these creations available separate from the book? And perhaps you can tell us about Proxima Vera.
Ong: Yes, many of these works exist as editioned pieces that are available through Proxima Vera. I originally founded Proxima Vera as a vehicle to produce and share these works with audiences at book fairs and institutional collections. I also enjoy overseeing the design production as someone who has been a designer for about twenty years now with experience collaborating with vendors on producing everything from exhibits to publications to digital design.
To me, publishing visual poetry differs from traditional models where designers are typically brought in at a later stage in the process and who may not have a close relationship with the text. In my approach to visual poetry, design is inherent to the inception and authorship of the poems, each decision contributing to the content, structure, and meaning that is rendered by both the visual and textual elements together. Thus, it was important for me to create a publishing infrastructure where I could be in the position give design a more integral role in the production of the poems, and where I could take the kinds of risks that I believe in.
The work I was able to produce via Proxima Vera has been exhibited at the Center for Book Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and the Hunterdon Art Museum, and has also been acquired by over fifty institutional collections worldwide. As my confidence deepened, I went on to expand it into an artist imprint so that I could also bring my designer’s eye to building a publishing infrastructure that is specifically in service to visual poetry.
Nelson: Being a publisher of poetry books, I can say with certainty that making a book of poems—in the traditional way of printed text on paper—is no easy task, but there are centuries of infrastructure in place to make that possible: paper manufacturers, professional printers and binders, means of distribution, etc. Can you talk about some of the challenges unique to reaching audiences for visual poetry, especially for work that doesn’t fit well on the printed page?
Ong: As a visual poet, I build my process from regularly considering three questions:
What is the poem asking for in terms of how it would like to meet the reader?
What decisions set up the best context of reading in support of the work’s intent?
What workflows need to exist for the poem to be properly realized?
I tend to make my work in series towards some kind of exhibition experience—I like that because exhibitions tend to encourage variety in terms of format, scale, and interaction, which allows me to experiment with how audiences can experience a poem, whether it’s a print, in an installation, or as a literary object.
For poetry broadsides, it is important to design with letterpress workflows in mind as there are some typographic choices and file preparation steps that need to be compatible with the kind of dies or plates that are used for printing. In another scenario, The Insomnia Poems within Planetaria were inspired by sleep tapes, so I was compelled to create an audio installation where visitors encountered the poems as cassette tapes in listening spaces surrounded by custom print silk pillows that feature the artwork from the poems. For sculptural or interactive objects, there are spatial considerations as well as choices that consider how scale, materials, and lighting affect the poem’s legibility in the space.
While this is happening, I am also simultaneously thinking about the version of the poem that can be published in more traditional channels like literary journals, online magazines, and eventually as a book. When I translate a body of work into a publication, there’s a series of design considerations for shifting the work from the spatial boundaries of the gallery into a printed publication, which comes with its own set of design principles and typographic protocols.
photo: Tom Virgin