Frances Cannon : on Grotto

 

 

 

 

There is a strange vision lodged in my memory and subconscious: fountains and alcoves dripping with artificial mineral deposits, bulbous growths of stone and cement, shells embedded in hypnotic mosaic patterns, wet with water and algae. When I visited Madrid last summer for a botany conference, I wandered from park to park in sickening heat, and in a shaded courtyard in the heart of El Retiro Park, I noticed a fountain that I instinctively clocked as ‘ugly’—ugly to me, yet utterly compelling. I couldn’t pull my eyes away. The fountain looked like a mistake, or an unfinished sculpture—rough, loose globs of stone and cement, forming two massive structures: a crude base, and a loosely elevated ‘top’, water spilling forth haphazardly.

In a frenzy of curiosity-driven research, I learned that this fountain was built during the Victorian ‘Grotto’ architectural craze, out of a material called ‘Pulhamite,’ which is an artificial stone featuring a mix of rubble, rocks, and cement. Grotto-grotesque architecture has much earlier origins, in the Renaissance, grotto caves were built in private estates and gardens for personal and social entertainment. This particular fountain in El Retiro in Madrid has a mixed history—the “Estanque Ochavado” also known as the “Fountain of the Snails” (Fuente de los Caracoles) or the “Pond of the Bells” (Estanque de las Campanillas). The pond itself dates back to the early 17th century, but the fountain was constructed in the early 1900s. Snails, Bells, Rubble, this ‘ugly’ fountain style has transformed into a personal obsession. I now seek out grotto-style fountains, walls, alcoves, sculptures, gates, fireplaces, in every city that I travel. 

Pondering this fountain, I also remembered a similarly ‘grotesque’ room in the Boboli Gardens in Firenze. I traveled there in high school and haven’t been back since, but the city affected me so strongly that I could draw a memory map of every street I walked on, complete with bookshops and gelaterias. I remember clearly visiting this grotesque room that I now know is called “La Grotta del Buontalenti”—it is a cavernous, arched, partly covered courtyard featuring a fountain and lavishly decorated walls, reminiscent of the drip castles I built from wet sand and mud as a child. Many grottos and grotesque fountains are built using shells as decoration, such as the shell house in Grosvenor Gardens. I’m more drawn to the rough, cave-like “rustication” textures, and the vermiculated architecture where a stone surface is carved with a texture resembling worm tracks in mud (from the Latin vermiculus, "little worm") 

So, what does any of this have to do with poetry? Well, follow my strange obsessions and rabbit holes of research, like the burrowing tracks of a worm,or slime paths of a snail, and you’ll find my little chapbook of poems,“Grotto”!

 

 

 

 

Frances Cannon is a writer, editor, educator, and artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland and Burlington, Vermont. She is the Reviews Editor for Poetry Wales, an editorial reader for The Kenyon Review, and an affiliated scholar at Kenyon College, where she recently completed the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellowship. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA from the University of Vermont. She is the author and illustrator of several books: Walter Benjamin Reimagined (MIT Press, 2019), The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank (Gold Wake Press, 2017), Tropicalia (Vagabond Press, 2016), Fling Diction (Green Writers Press, 2024), Willow and the Storm (Green Writers Press, 2025), and Queer Flora, Fauna, Funga (forthcoming with Valiz Press in 2026).

Frances Cannon : Two poems

 

 

 

 

In the lesbian garden, Antwerp 

Sorting through mental images of you—
         crouched over a pond in the snow, smiling
         at a slime mold on a wet log, 
         stepping over a brick wall 
         to find a singular fern, 
         lifting dead leaves away 
         from the surface of a miniature bog, 
         tenderly parting the tips of sphagnum moss
         to better see creatures hiding in rainwater—
in trying to interpret this data, I’m reminded
of a recent seminar by a botanical paleontologist 
on a quest to find Fibonacci spirals 
in ancient lycophyte fossils 
from a bog near Inverness; 
he plotted the points of leaf nodes
on a graph and traced the dots to find 
rings, spirals, or an absence of pattern, 
         entropy. Making meaning from images—
or, I’m visualizing the abstraction of you—
seeing metaphors for who I want you to be,
the confirmation bias of a crush.
         maybe you never touched the moss,
         those might have been my fingers, my smile
         in the snow by the pond in the winter garden.
         Subconsciously fitting you into my pattern.
If you’re an atom, my inadequate sketch 
of your orbitals can only approximate 
the true motion of your electrons. 
         Can I thwart this duality and hold both
the image and the concept? Once, examining
a drop of pond water under the microscope, 
I found an elongate rod with microhairs, 
animal or vegetable, I could not tell. I traced 
the line seeking its terminus, allowing my fantasy
to bloom as I navigated the object: some minute
hydra, or a hairy beast with thousands of legs, 
or the dried husk of an algal strand. I adjusted
the scope, zoomed out, and found a creature
beyond the limits of my imagination: 
vernal pool fairy knob-lipped fairy shrimp. 
There, can I keep them both? My dream 
of a tiny pond monster, and the lyrical reality of science?
Can I have both versions of you: your flesh and mind,
and this elaborate painting I’ve dreamed of you?

 

 

The archive

Am I a bowerbird, arranging iridescent beetle elytra 
around my nest to attract a mate?
A collector, combing through a rubbish heap 
for shiny objects with historical value?
An archivist, transcribing the present 
into journals and cataloging photographs 
that will curl and fade in leather bound photo albums 
on a dusty shelf they share with childhood diaries?
A hoarder of books and ephemera 
that will thicken around me 
until I am enclosed in a paper tomb?
Or a nest of mud and straw 
like the tenements cliff swallows 
build under bridges and eaves?

 

 

 

 

Frances Cannon is a writer, editor, educator, and artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland and Burlington, Vermont. She is the Reviews Editor for Poetry Wales, an editorial reader for The Kenyon Review, and an affiliated scholar at Kenyon College, where she recently completed the Mellon Science and Nature Writing Fellowship. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA from the University of Vermont. She is the author and illustrator of several books: Walter Benjamin Reimagined (MIT Press, 2019), The Highs and Lows of Shapeshift Ma and Big-Little Frank (Gold Wake Press, 2017), Tropicalia (Vagabond Press, 2016), Fling Diction (Green Writers Press, 2024), Willow and the Storm, (Green Writers Press, 2025), and Queer Flora, Fauna, Funga (forthcoming with Valiz Press in 2026). A new chapbook, Grotto, is forthcoming with above/ground press.