Granny Cloud makes us look at language upside down. Farnoosh Fathi’s latest book harnesses a force of sonic play which tests the limits of the imagination, sex, landscape and form. Moreover, in this new collection, the poems instruct the reader toward what lies beneath the institution of our language, to the inkwell in our bodies. Granny Cloud reshuffles (read: juggles) the deck of our economical relation to desire. It shows us that, in order to give an account of anything, we have to question our assumptions—our relationships between desire and knowledge, meaning and ecstasy. The book’s depth and play lie in its baroque enchantment that rejects any entrenched form, showing each word’s plurality of worlds.
Part of Granny Cloud’s brilliance lies in its disruption of narrative and of our expectations for meaning. Yet Fathi’s lyrical moves also feel comfortable conversing and consorting with others. One of those others might be Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography, where she writes, “Anything is an autobiography but this was a conversation.” Thus Fathi attempts, through disruption, to give us a real sense of “conversation”—or of the performance of a self. Put another way, we can say what each poem in Granny Cloud is about, but it wouldn’t fully capture Fathi’s dynamic processes of meaning-making. For instance, a womb does remind us of a “Luxe Chariot w/ Bidet (Meals on Wheels).” And are not “Blimp Guts” also part of the womb? Is the water in “Eau de Lol” the fluid of the amniotic sac? Do we feel better once we “get” what is going on? Granny Cloud answers these questions with more questions, showing the reader a refreshingly alternate world that language can take.
Each “then” or matter of “consequence” that appears in the book takes us farther and farther away from the accepted notion of “event” and more towards the soft intricacies that make up time when we dare to look at it fully—when we dare not to accept its given structure of “then” and “now.” Fathi’s sense of meaning, time, mishearing and sound, is reminiscent of recent works such as Robert Glück’s I, Boombox, or, at least in principle, Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino’s Hearing, yet her references span from Dostoevsky to St. Francis, Shakespeare to Pope. While we initially look at the main “event” of Granny Cloud as the act of creating a human child (“a ping pong stuffed uterus”), what we receive instead is a book about the nature of meaning and the senses.
This disorientation adds to the book’s humor, such as in the poem “Eau de Lol.” Its title also contains eau de l’oeil, or eau de l’eau—from fluid to fragrance to sight. The poem’s, and the book’s constant chiding of utility deposits the reader in the midst of a party:
Riding like a joke
around which pages are flapping wildly—
to the highest point of my interest—to the ball of the bald.
A crowd explodes from the vulture—
It swings to me, on purple floss, screaming
Marigolds and their drugs behind an ear
One must intend—but my eternity
is something else—too emotional, too alone with possibility—
jugging the eau d'lol, forgetting to say anything,
forgetting the birthright of every poem, right here—that
birth is inevitable.
To read Granny Cloud we must: apply the Eau d’Lol, be the “null juggler of lol-water,” cut gently through language to expose its iridescent meanings.
Granny Cloud has a vertiginous way of reproducing itself, of making its own definitions, through a sensual, bodily force that appears and produces its own kind of precipitation. The speaker of the poem insists that we be true to language’s complexity. Take, for instance, “A Country Wave”:
Unfortunately, I don’t like to work, to face any one eye,
pyrrhic as it is
…
I personally can’t stand there,
perhaps because if anally plugged into the audience myself
I am as distracted as a starling, endless destinations
aplot its back.
To place anyone, now look straight! Shams of a notion,
one who can be entertained as if entertained.
The speaker’s “anus of overhearing” opens us up to language’s possibilities and its arbitrary regulations. Granny Cloud creates “flowering excerpts / inside anuses,”—“a rose set down in a blowhole.” In order to get to the heart of the poem Fathi asks us, “what does a penis do?” The poem asks us to enter the heart and guts of “sex.”
The sexual world and fantasies of Granny Cloud work not simply as destabilizing modernist gestures but provide a supple framework where sex and sexuation take pleasure in the spaces between coming. Sex appears as the space to come, in characters, sounds and places such as, “anal snails,” “Goon’s cave,” “pew juices.” The book is situated in medias res of coming, which is part of its allure, and the disembodied speaker’s ability to exclaim, “I’m gonna watch this poem goon all virtue off its face.” The reader cannot fully enter Granny Cloud without situating themselves in its sex, in a place “from which immense sex is flung, signatures written with / crutches (dipped in anuses).” Fathi asks us how we can enliven this space through the facetiously naive question, "Well, how do we wave in the country?"
In inhabiting this disembodied world, Granny Cloud shows itself to be scintillatingly self-conscious. The book does not impose its “system” against virtue per se but instead ends with a reflection on the impossibility of poetic cohesion, to put it clumsily. The final third of the book, “Anyone’s Don’tanelle,” both harkens Stein’s explorations in Autobiography while also opening a “soft spot” in the book’s own modernist systematizing. A fontanelle is an anatomical feature of the infant human skull, colloquially a “soft spot.” Fathi's formal soft spot does not allow for our accustomed coherences, it relies on possibility and especially on the plurality of worlds, a favorite question of the other “Fontanelle,” the French polymath Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. Is the skull named after the thinker like the craters on the moon? The “Fontanelle” that concludes the book, “Anyone’s Don’tanelle,” forces the reader to come to terms with the fact that our knowledge of event, narrative, and language, can and must be rearranged. Each time the poet picks up the poem by its soft spot, they risk disfiguring the poem:
That he dies, And I want to do this. The peas shoop in a
wed valley, a valley like the gull with a pea eye. [Here you
must bow.] Eyes that [will] gull and turn and roll into a
bow. Now when bowing you can just tell—Wad the pall—
and gall at the stand spearheaded among flies. Stand, stay,
and grant the fontanelle, My stomping ground, The
stomping ground of all students. Are we Editing or
writing? I see the spiders carousel the pen.
In this concluding form, which we might go so far as to call a "Fathi-nelle," the poetic moment slips in and out of our grasp. The reader encounters versions upon versions of "this photo...occurs," each attempting to create a more accurate rendering of what it is that really “occurs.” In this Steinian manner of composition, we are invited to “wad the pall,” as it were: “pall” could mean a collection of fancy robes, a feeling of disgust or distaste, or a piece of a fence. Fathi finds a “soft spot” for every “definition” the reader discovers and lets us revel in their unravelling.
Towards the end of the experiment, the speaker of Granny Cloud might seem to give up on finding the self in language. A voice exclaims in the penultimate poem, “Blimp Guts,” “If only I could unite myself with what I write!” What ends up following in the wake of reading Granny Cloud, a reading which one wants to do over and over and over, is instead a meditation on how language makes up the self—as opposed to some deconstructive exercise. It is as if each frame of the event that Fathi takes apart brings us closer and closer to the event of the poem itself—a moment where “the whole earth below them…writes.” Yet when Fathi’s experiment reaches its zenith, the poet realizes the impossibility of putting together the poetic moment without the imagination. She jumps into the scene, “[I can see what’s happening up there—I’m trying to cut without writing things anew and I’m getting stuck. I’ve left the imagination.]” Between imagination and confession, shame, guts and holes, the poem ends in a blaze of associations which urge us to look at the world with care, desire and joy. To read, we must reorient. Fathi shows us that reading is an active not a passive force, and one where, if we’re careful, our sonic units can take us into their many possible worlds. “Are we quiet or are we crying?”