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- CELESTIAL EARTH: We Are Here … but when? A MULTIMEDIA POETRY PERSPECTIVE
CELESTIAL EARTH: We Are Here … but when?
A MULTIMEDIA POETRY PERSPECTIVE
THREE SHOWS!
APRIL 19, 2025 AT 2PM AND APRIL 26, 2025 AT 2PM and 7PM
VERSANT POWER ASTRONOMY CENTER AND
MAYNARD JORDAN PLANETARIUM
167 RANGELEY RD
University of Maine at Orono
TEL: 207.581.1341• planetarium@maine.edu
"Are we too crowded with frenzy / and the blinding fire of one war or another / to see the light we make? Must we wait so long for revelation / to burst out of the pitch dark, for recognition of the harm repeated / in every era? The truth still moving toward us, trying to catch us."
These are but a few of the questions asked in conceptual poet Barbaria Maria's Planetarium program "Celestial Earth: We Are Here … but when?" Presented by Maria's SoundBone Media group along with the Versant Power Astronomy Center and Jordan Planetarium at UMO, it's an epic multimedia poetry event just in time for a much-needed spring break.
This is poetry raised to astronomical proportions (pun intended), short films that wander into the core of who we might become, and a sonic journey to the Big Bang and back, down to the molten center of everything.
The main event takes us through the universe and into our wondering inner selves as we ride our planet through an epic soundscape
created by SoundBone Media with audio engineer Lincoln Clapp
for Maria's 2024 long-form poem "Celestial Earth"
with the stars and planets of the spacious black universe all around us,
piloted by the center's director, Shawn Laatsch.
Join us for the films When She Became a Buffalo (2012), Since We Can't Go Back (2015), and Convergence (2016), each created by the poet and subtitled for the hearing impaired. The soundscape "Celestial Earth," however, will occur in dark starlight without titles or sign language interpreters.
Three showings of this program will be presented on April 19th at 2pm, and April 26 at 2pm and 7pm. Admission is only $10! Chapbooks with the four featured poems and CDs of Celestial Earth will be available after the show.
For Information or tickets, see https://astro.umaine.edu or call the Planetarium at (207) 581-1341.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
BARBARIA MARIA is a conceptual poet, performer, and teacher whose work asks us to see what's in front of us, listen to what's inside of us, and connect to all that's beyond us. The author of two books of poetry, Crossing Time and Palace Boulevard, the poetry CD 108 Names: Poems to the Divine with music by Jeff Densmore, and several choreopoems, including "The Song of Creation" and "Excuse Me, But ...", her work is both intimate and transpersonal. Her multimedia installation "Soul Migration" (Waterfall Arts 2011) utilized magic realism to locate the migration of her ancestors across the ocean from Sicily to America within the transoceanic journey of the self from birth to death and death to birth. "Celestial Earth" and the films in this event come from the same impulse to reach through the facts to the unknowable whole truth that lies within every one of us.
