Timothy Yu: Unnameable Light
Her Gaze, a ViewMaster reel poem in tribute astronomy Caroline Herschel by Monica Ong.
by Timothy Yu
To encounter Monica Ong’s visual poetry in Planetaria is not simply to read, but to experience a new way of viewing the world. The means by which Ong offers this new perspective are disarmingly literal: Her Gaze takes the form of reels for a View-Master, the vintage toy of the 1970s and 1980s that allowed children to peer into stereoscopic scenes. But what we see through Ong’s lenses is most often a representation of the unseen. Her Gaze takes as its subject the astronomer Caroline Herschel, whose extraordinary accomplishments were often overshadowed by those of her more famous brother; in her poem “Planetarium,” Adrienne Rich imagines Caroline Herschel among “Galaxies of women, there / doing penance for impetuousness.” Against the backdrop of a night sky, Ong places a silhouette of Herschel, overlaid with lines that capture the constrictions and yearnings of Caroline’s grueling service to her brother, including feeding him while he worked: “Placing midnight / victuals in the mouth’s devotion…The belly’s moth flutters / towards an unnamable light.”
It is that “unnamable light” toward which Ong’s work strives, offering us new mappings through which the seemingly immutable can be seen anew.