The Magical Breasts of Britney Spears by Ryan G. Van Cleave
General
Book Information
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Poetry by Ryan G. Van Cleave |
Praise
for The Magical
Breasts of Britney Spears
¨ By writing so unabashedly about the glitter, the effluvia, the very Britney of contemporary American life, Ryan Van Cleave may have shortened the shelf-life of these poems, but few readers of today will be able to resist his supercharged language and unbound satirical exuberance.
—Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate 2001-2003 ¨ Ryan Van Cleave’s explosive riffs roll over the American pop culture landscape like a caffeined-up emcee from the dark side. Trying to keep up with his quick wit and dizzying leaps may leave you out of breath, but gasping with surprise and wonder, marveling at how—beneath the glitz—Van Cleave has found the sick, twisted soul of this country.
—Jim Daniels, author of Show and Tell
¨ Anger, hunger, and desire power Ryan Van Cleave’s excitable new poems, but their rudeboy force is always harnessed by a larger comic vision. Whether he’s channeling King Kong, Bubbles the Chimp, or Counter-Terrorist Barbie, Van Cleave alternately throttles and embraces our less-than-perfect world, turning its wild inconsistencies to his own ends. Never shying away from the facts on the ground, these poems, like Michael Jackson’s tortured Bubbles, adamantly refuse to be denied.
—Rachel Loden, author of Hotel Imperium
¨ In The Magical Breasts of Britney Spears, Van Cleave makes unforgettable music. Tuned to the frequency of the moment, this book brilliantly articulates the paradoxes of the postmodern American landscape. Anxieties, elations, grievings—this book has it all.
—Virgil Suárez, author of 90 Miles: Selected and New Poems
ISBN 1-59709-067-0 * April 2006 *
$16.95
The Magical
Breasts of Britney Spears by Ryan G. Van
Cleave
The Author
The Author
Born
in Wisconsin, Ryan G. Van Cleave was raised in the Chicago suburbs, and is a
graduate of Florida State University’s Ph.D. program. His poems and other writings have been included in magazines and
journals nationwide, including The Harvard Review, The Iowa Review,
The Missouri Review, The North American Review, Notre Dame
Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and TriQuarterly, as
well as periodicals in Australia, England, France, India, Ireland, and New
Zealand.
He
teaches creative writing and American literature at Clemson University, where
he lives with his wife and daughter. The
Magical Breasts of Britney Spears is his fifth poetry collection. The author of a textbook on writing poetry,
he is also the co-editor of five poetry anthologies, including Like Thunder:
Poets Respond to Violence in America, which received the American Poetry
Anthology Award.
Publications
¨
Poems
in this book were first published in: Barrow Street, The Chaffin
Journal, Cider Press Review, Clackamas Literary Review, descant, Diagram, Diner,
Eclipse, Fire (U.K.), Floating Holiday, Grand Street, Harpur Palate, HazMat
Review, The Homestead Review, The Lullwater Review, Maize, Ontario Review,
Oregon East, RE:AL, River Oak Review, Southern Humanities Review,
and Third Coast.
Awards
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“Blue
Man Group & the Shiftiness of Wu Wei” won the 2002 Harpur Palate
Milton Kessler Poetry Award.
¨
“I
!© Tiger Woods” won 2nd prize in the
2002 Diner Poetry Contest.
¨
Selected
poems from The Magical Breasts of Britney Spears were collected as Bubbles
Speaks and won 2nd prize in the 2005 Main Street Rag Poetry
Chapbook contest.
www.themagicalbreastsofbritneyspears.com
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Poem
samples
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Audio
clips
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Reading
group discussion questions
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Ordering
information
The
Magical Breasts of Britney Spears by Ryan G.
Van Cleave
Sample Interview
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Why did you choose to write about Britney
Spears? Popular culture is ever-present in our lives; we are constantly bombarded by images and sounds that tell us what is cool, what (or who) is beautiful, and what we should value as important. We’re so assaulted by these images that we scarcely stop to consider the influence that popular culture has on our ideas of who we are and our own relationship to the world around us. Britney, in particular, seems to represent the corrosive effect that popular culture can have when our lives are subject to the demands of the entertainment world. Also, many of today’s poets choose to write in a manner that is not intended to communicate with a general audience. This book, however, invites and encourages readers from beyond the regular insular poetry community. |
But what about her breasts? Why focus on that aspect of Britney’s public
image?
Partially this was due to the intense attention her
breasts created by their apparent ability to grow and shrink on their own. There’s even an animation video online
entitled “The Mystery of Britney Spears’ Breasts” that was (and still is) quite
popular. There’s something particularly disturbing about the demands we put on
ourselves, our bodies, to access the world of beauty as prescribed by
society. When a young woman goes to the
lengths that Britney and others have, we should take note and try to decode
what this sort of behavior means for ourselves, for our children, for the
future of our society.
Britney’s
an icon of popular culture, like it or not.
She has three times as many hate websites as does Saddam Hussein, and
twice as many as George W. Bush. That
says something to me. Sure, I could’ve
written about Christina Aguilera or Paris Hilton or Michael Jackson or so many
others, but something about Britney haunts me.
There’s a terrible sadness in her eyes, as if she woke up one morning
and asked herself, “How the hell did I get here?” And now she’s trying to implant meaning in her life through
multiple marriages, having children at an early age, and exploring her
sexuality in a very public format.
She’s lost and it’s as much our fault as hers.
So
your poetry collection isn’t a “bash Britney” book?
Not at all.
Sure, it uses satire and humor to get at some core societal and cultural
issues, as does The Simpsons, The Family Guy, and Saturday
Night Live. Some of these poems
have fun with the idea of public/private lives and the American star system
which plays off our hopes that The Great Gatsby and Death of Salesman
were wrong, that the American Dream does exist and you too can have your own
Horatio Alger rags to riches story.
Reality TV—one of the most manufactured and contrived things on TV—does
this, too.
Consider Joe Millionaire, or even more poignantly, American
Idol. Only three
or four of the contestants have real star power, and
it’s so obvious in these few that each
The
Magical Breasts of Britney Spears by Ryan G.
Van Cleave
Sample Interview (continued)
would likely have been discovered on their own. The other eighty thousand contestants are
having their spirit broken in a crushing realization that for them, America is
not the land of dreams. And ten million
of us get to watch them cry as we point and laugh.
The
book is more than just Britney poems.
Lord knows there are plenty enough pop culture icons and images to give
voice to or take issue with. King Kong,
Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee Bubbles, Monica Lewinsky, Barbie, Ben Stein,
Macaulay Culkin, The Muppets, Simon Cowell, Tiger Woods, Mike Tyson, Captain
Kirk, Yanni, Bert and Ernie. It’s my
contention that some of the most pervasive and complex issues of our postmodern
world are best examined through the lens of popular culture.
Name some other texts that are doing the same sort
of things with popular culture that you’re doing in The Magical Breasts of
Britney Spears.
Don DeLillo’s White Noise. The movie American Beauty. David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day. Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to
Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Plus the poetry of Albert Goldbarth, Denise Duhamel, Ai,
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Charles Harper Webb, Jeffrey McDaniel, and Billy Collins,
to name just a few. I’m not the first
writer to use poetry as a vehicle to explore popular culture, and I surely
won’t be the last.
Would
it be fair to say that you see popular culture as a negative thing?
Not in the least.
I grew up with Dungeons & Dragons, Sunday morning cartoons, Star
Wars, G.I. Joe figures, big-hair 80s bands, Smurfs, the McRib, Rubik’s
Cubes, and parachute pants. Even today
I watch American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. I carry an iPod, a cell phone with camera
function and Internet capability, and a portable Playstation unit. People who claim they don’t own a TV come
off as boasting that they don’t cater to the low-culture mob that America has
become. I love popular culture. Taken passively and without critical
attention, popular culture can be a destructive force. But to actively and intellectually engage
with pop culture demands a high level of analytical thinking—it also helps us
understand the forces that are helping shape America’s future. Consider books such as Everything Bad Is
Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by
Stephen Johnson, which claim pop culture is a very positive force. Maybe listening to “Oops! . . .I Did It
Again” might not make us smarter, but asking ourselves what explicit or
implicit messages are incorporated into the delivery of that cotton-candy song
might.
What
do you want people to take away from reading these poems?
Like the work of Billy Collins, I hope readers find
these poems accessible and memorable.
Humor might help make that happen, as might the subdued formal elements
in them that emerge from my lifelong love of John Keats, T. S. Eliot, and W. H.
Auden. Poetry is indeed a cultural
force, but a poem that doesn’t evoke emotion and please a reader through vivid
imagery and the beauty of language simply is not going to last.
Perhaps
Edward Hirsch says it best in his bestselling book How to Read a Poem and
Fall In Love With Poetry: “Poetry puts us on a hook—it makes us responsible
for what we might otherwise evade in ourselves and in others. It gives us greater access to
ourselves.” Much of the reason I’m an
educator—I teach creative writing and American literature at Clemson
University—is to help young people reexamine the world they live in and
reevaluate their relationship to it. If
my poems provoke some of the same reactions in a reader, I’ll consider the book
a resounding success.
The Magical Breasts of Britney
Spears by Ryan G. Van Cleave Media
Ryan G. Van
Cleave is available for interviews, discussions, class visits, workshop groups,
and conferences. Please contact the
publicity coordinator if you are interested in reaching the author.
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Red Hen Press
Company Information
Founded in 1994 by Mark E. Cull and
Kate Gale, Red Hen Press is a nonprofit literary press that focuses on
publishing high-quality, innovative poetry and literary fiction titles,
particularly those by first-time writers.
Red Hen Press has garnered much support from both independent and chain
publishers with many of their titles being highlighted in marketing programs
from each, including success such as: Tisch by two-time National Book
Award nominee Stephen Dixon, his first written novel and most seminal work, and
The Last Mojito by Bart Edelman, a poetry collection that’s become a
bookseller handsell favorite.
Red Hen Press is partially supported by the City of Los Angeles Cultural
Affairs Department, the California Arts Council, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission,
and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Today, Red Hen Press publishes nearly 25 books a year that help
maintain Los Angeles’ place in the United States as a literary center.
Red Hen Press’ Mission Statement: Our purpose is first to create and promote good writing. We wish to create a place in the world for good writers whose work is ignored by the conglomerate publishers, but whose voices deserve to be heard, particularly writers whose work has been marginalized. We seek a diversity of voices that speak to what it means to be human and speak it well. We will endeavor toward the promotion of cultural literacy in the community. We will share book, readings, poetry, literature and ideas. Our goal is to allow good work to swim to the surface and then to share that work so that literature can create a common language space for global, community and individual transformation.
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