Showing posts with label Britney Spears. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Britney Spears. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

The Britney Suite




Все поэты жиди
– Marina Tsvetayeva, “Poem of the End” (1924)

[All poets – yids]


For Dieter Riemenschneider & Jan Kemp


CONTENTS:

Both-handed




You can be a good person and still be sexy
– Britney Spears


Beidhändige Frühe
holt sich mein Aug,
dann erscheinst du –

wieviel Möwengefolge
hat deine Stirn?

Seegängerisch knattert das Wort,
dem ich absagte, an dir
vorbei,

ein von Steinwut schwingendes Tor noch,
gesteh’s der
notreifen Nacht zu.

[29/9/69]



when is it not a question of last things?
– Paul Celan


BOTH-HANDED dawn
hold up my eye
till you appear

how many seagulls stall
above your forehead?

The word rattles like surf
my negative by
you

a stone-mad swinging door
give up
too earlynight

mr darling writes to penthouse forum





Isn’t this ‘Britney Spears’ some sort of sixteen-year-old pop idol with a pretty face and plastic voice? I think I noticed a lot of 9-year-old girls on a documentary going on about how she was their heroine and ultimate symbol of everything good in life. Oh yeah, more’s beginning to come back to me ... she’s impertinently sexy, licks her lips and looks like she’s just come in from an all-night party at the local brothel, and proclaims she’s a virgin and gives lectures about traditional family values. She the one?
– Letter to the author (29 October, 2000)



mr darling writes to penthouse forum

dear forum

i think my secretary likes me the other day she was slurping my footlong yes I know it sounds a lot but she works out every morning and is now accustomed to it when i nearly came out and asked her do you like me id have preferred to use her christian name though for such a declaration and i dont know what it is take some dicktation instead ms smith i said and sodomised her on the desk
its preying on my mind
is it just my imagination sometimes when im deep inside i see the faintest glimmer in her eyes as if there was something there some kind of feeling love tenderness call it what you will then she orgasms instead
ive tried buying her things not just the usual g strings baby dolls vibrators but romantic things a bunch of flowers liqueur chocolates she takes the lot the loot beautiful booty

i dont know what to do talking to her seems such an extreme step to take and yet i fear i may be driven to it i cannot work or sleep or even masturbate to climax what would you suggest im really desperate

– Wendy Nu


Chalk-crocus




My main focus are my fans. Not some 40-year-old fart
– Britney Spears


KALK-KROKUS, im
Hellwerden: dein
steckbriefgereiftes
Von-dort-und-auch-dort-her,
unspaltbar,

Sprengstoffe
lächeln dir zu,
die Delle Dasein
hilft einer Flocke
aus sich heraus,

in den Fundgruben
staut sich die Moldau.


[24/8/68]



Poems are sketches for existence: the poet lives up to them
– Paul Celan


CHALK-CROCUSat
daybreakyour
multidimension/locational WANTED
poster vital statistics
stop

bombs
smile at you
the dent of Dasein
helps the radar
out

the Manukau
silts up the vaults

Snowpart




I am eighteen years old and I have the whole world staring at me
– Britney Spears


SCHNEEPART, gebäumt, bis zuletzt,
im Aufwind, vor
den für immer entfensterten
Hütten:

Flachträume schirken
übers
geriffelte Eis;

die Wortschatten
heraushaun, sie klaftern
rings um den Krampen
im Kolk.

[22/1/68]



Language doesn’t just build bridges into the world, but into loneliness
– Paul Celan


SNOWPARTclose-ribbedto the last
updraftin front
always gap-windowed
huts

flat dreams shave
stiff brist
led ice

hew out word
shadowscord them
round the ringbolt
in the pit

Britney & Paul

[Daniel Edwards, "Monument to Pro-life: The Birth of Sean Preston" (2006)]


What's become of Britney?

Where's that blonde goddess, resplendent in red spandex, revealed once and for all when the pyramids of Mars split apart in the "Oops, I did it again ..." video? The plaid-skirted schoolgirl temptress of "Hit me baby one more time"? The madly metamorphosing super-spy of "Toxic"?

Pop has, alas, once more eaten itself. She's split with her hubbie, cut off her hair, gone into rehab, run away from rehab, gone back into rehab ...

I guess the whole subject was recalled to me when Gabriel White asked to post "Nouvelle Vague" on his site -- it's a soundfile taken from a sequence of poems I composed back in the palmy days of Britneymania, in 2001 ...

That sequence was called "The Britney Suite," and was based on the conceit of a kind of psychic meeting between Britney Spears and Paul Celan -- the most plastic, constructed persona imaginable, a blonde American teen-singing-sensation, juxtaposed with the very epitome of high culture cool -- the tormented archpoet Celan (for more on him, see my paper from the Auckland University Poetics of Exile Conference (2003): "Meeting Paul Celan".

I guess I thought if I just put them together, sparks would fly. I couldn't help feeling that Celan would find something attractive in the sensuous simplicity of Britney's world. By the same token, Britney seemed to me to be enacting a kind of Zen self-education in the school of hard knocks as she experienced the complete breakdown between public and private in her own life.

But as I began to write, lots of other intermediate figures startling jostling for space: a motley crew of pornographers, pop artists and dream girls.

I put out the poem as a little chapbook at the time, in 2001, and for a while Gabriel and I had a plan of making a film out of it. Funding was refused, however (I wonder why?), so it's languished on the back burner ever since. Though it did go down rather well when I read it in its entirety at Poetry Live -- less well at the Canterbury Poets' Collective.

Now I feel a bit responsible -- as if life were imitating art. The baroque excesses of the poem appear to have been uncomfortably prophetic of the real-life Britter's voyage to the end of the night. It would be megalomaniac to think I had anything to do with causing it, but that doesn't make me feel any less guilty for having discerned its rough outlines from afar.

Cassandra is never a comfortable role to play.

I'd like to share it with you now, though, in any case, and will be putting it up piecemeal on the blog over the next few days. Please note that sections of it are R18, though ... caveat lector.


[Paul Celan (Romania, 1920 -Paris, 1970)]