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)]

Scott Free

[Ellen Portch, front cover image for brief #34: War]

The Arts journal brief was founded by Alan Loney in 1995 under the title A Brief Description of the Whole World. In those days it was a quarterly, with a certain number of pages reserved for each of a small number of contributors. The first ten issues of the magazine appeared between December 1995 and October 1998 (a double issue: 10/11).

John Geraets revived it in mid-1999. His first issue was a reprint of Leigh Davis's Willy's Gazette (1983), but he went on to edit eleven more issues, taking the magazine through at least three more name changes (ABDOTWW / Ab.WW & AbdotWW) before settling on the more succinct appellation brief which it retains today.

Geraets asked me to take over as editor in 2002, and I edited the magazine for the next three years, from July 2002 until May 2005, approximately nine issues (depending on whether you count the immense #30/31: Kunst-Kultur issue as one or two). In my time brief moved from being a quarterly to appearing three times a year.

I also followed John Geraets' lead in trying to develop brief's publishing arm, the Writers Group, which issued two titles under his editorship and three under mine. They are, in order:

- Alan Loney’s Reading / Saying / Making: Selected Essays (2001)
- Sugu Pillay’s The Chandrasekhar Limit and other stories (2002)
- Jack Ross's A brief Index: 1995-2003 [Supplemental Index: 2003-2005] (2003/2005)
- Kendrick Smithyman’s Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian (2004)
- K. M. Ross’s novel Falling through the Architect (2005)

Throughout the first ten years (and 32 issues) of its existence, brief's format remained relatively consistent: A4 sheets, copied – so far as possible – exactly as their authors wrote them, ordered, bound, then distributed with bio-notes and a cover. The magazine has always had a commitment to publishing technically adventurous literary and graphic work, by acknowledged (and newly discovered) innovators. Pageworks, critical articles, poems and fictional texts were equally prominent in most issues. The Writers Group, and brief, have never received any official funding beyond subscriptions and donations, so all but occasional guest contributors have had to be subscribers.

Scott Hamilton took over as managing editor late in 2005. He now cedes that role to Brett Cross of Titus Books, who will be editing the next issue, no. 35.

What can one say about Scott as editor? An immensely inspiring and stimulating writer, and generous supporter of other people's work, Scott, I think, has done fine things with the two issues of brief he's edited. His intense political consciousness also gave the magazine a new relevance. All of that is on the plus side.

On the minus side, it's true that it's taken a very long time for those two issues to appear, and that in the process our original commitment to producing three issues a year has rather gone by the board. That's the only negative aspect I can see about his incumbency at brief.

Where the magazine goes to from here I'm not really sure. We've had to scale its size down from the original A4 format to A5 mainly for reasons of cost, but there doesn't seem to be any diminution in the quality -- or quantity -- of material in each issue.

Nor do I get any sense of growing indifference to the concept of an avant-garde literary magazine committed to representing the kinds of material which you won't see in the other journals.

Anyway, once again the managing editor is gone, long live the managing editor! Good luck to Brett in his new role. I hope you continue to support him. Maybe, with your help, this most maverick of literary magazines can continue for another decade or so ...

Here's a summary of the issues to date:

A Brief Description of the Whole World
Editor: Alan Loney
No 1, December 1995: 70 pp.
No 2, March 1996: 52 pp.
No 3, June 1996: 67 pp.
No 4, November 1996: 82 pp.
No 5, May 1997: 58 pp.
No 6, July 1997: 56 pp.
No 7, September 1997: 66 pp.
No 8, December 1997: 76 pp.
No 9, April 1998: 55 pp.
Nos 10 & 11, October 1998: 47 pp.
[629 pages overall]

A Brief Description of the Whole World
Editor: John Geraets
No 12, June 1999:
Leigh Davis: Willy’s Gazette (1983) [vii + 111 pp.]
ABDOTWW
No 13, September 1999: 93 pp.
No 14, December 1999: 110 pp.
ABDOTWW / description
No 15, March 2000: 86 pp.
Ab.WW / AbdotWW
No 16, June 2000: 85 pp.
Ab.ww / Loney
No 17, September 2000: 96 pp.
brief.
No 18, December 2000: 100 pp.
No 19, March 2001: 80 pp.
No 20, June 2001: 68 pp.
No 21, September 2001: 93 pp.
No 22, December 2001: 100 pp.
No 23, March 2002: 100 pp.
[1011 pages overall]

brief
Editor: Jack Ross
No 24, July 2002: 84 pp.
No 25, October 2002: 111 pp.
No 26, January 2003: 118 pp.
No 27, June 2003: 104 pp.
No 28, October 2003: 126 pp.
No 29, March 2004: 102 pp.
Nos 30/31, October 2004: 120/120 pp.
No 32, May 2005: 120 pp.
[1005 pages overall]

brief
Editor: Scott Hamilton
No 33, March 2006: 150 pp.
No 34, February 2007: 188 pp.
[338 pages overall]

[Ellen Portch, back cover image for brief #34: War]