Brian Fawcett's Local Matters: poetry, politics and cityscape, or why he stopped writing poetry
My introduction to Brian Fawcett is entirely serendipitous, meaning I'd encountered his name by accident in Ken Norris's book The Little Magazine in Canada 1925 - 80 as the editor of an early Vancouver newsletter NMFG that was short for (among other things) "No Money from the Government". I know brazenness of that kind is common enough; it's what every editor and publisher exploits for commercial success but after all these years, Fawcett the seasoned writer, street philosopher and local activist, seems genuine, less apt to disappoint and not just because he was a poet and pioneer in the early "small lit. mag movement" days (his affiliations with the magazine Iron also coming to mind), and his site dooneyscafe.com has grown into something like cultural icon status. But because he's Brian Fawcett. There's just something personable, likeable and good-naturedly Canadian about Fawcett you sense when you begin to read him, and something you tend to miss—not just a nostalgic return to common sense or something—when you don't. Just the sort of person we'd all like to chat over a coffee with, eh?
The Canadian cultural landscape is strewn with the corpses of my disappointed hopes. How's that for an opening premise: but it's true in a sense. And it's why I thought if there's anyone who could sympathize with my dream of Canadian poetry renewal (among other things), it's Brian Fawcett. After all, he was once a practicing poet actively involved in those heady early Vancouver 60s radical days, prone himself to what he's called a "manifesto moment" or two along the way. Who better to co-author a nationalist rebirth along the lines, say, of a new National Energy Program for the culture industry. Fawcett as a Trudeau figure taking on all the literary Lougheeds across the country. The "Exile" article, for example, doesn't it combine the acuity of social criticism with the activists' sense of moral outrage? Yes, from name to a national literary awakening seemed a reasonable step. The point is anyone who reads Fawcett can get this easily enthused, he's that congenial and that good: if s/he could just harness this man's radical and critical energies, what wouldn't be possible? And to think if I'd skipped to the next paragraph of Norris's book, I'd never have known he was alive and never have written this.
I'm probably embarrassing the man with all this so let me take it down a notch. I'll say that of all the contemporary writers I've encountered Fawcett's seemed the most congenial and honest, qualities that get sadly compromised in a market driven not by intellectual content but celebrity-appeal. As for that heady activist stuff with which I admit I first approached him, Fawcett, writer and former poet, has also been something of a splash of cold water over the head .Yes, his is a refreshingly unbiased voice of social and literary critique but the effect of quiet, sympathetic perusal of his work can be to put you in your place. Though it'd be great, I doubt if he'll march with me in a neo-Aesthetics literary parade anytime soon (he does say he's agoraphobic, too): his poetry and radical poetry magazine days may be over and he's earned the right to say his peace, writing quietly in his corner of Dooney's Café . We should all wear our grey hairs as gracefully as he does! He is Canada's premier public intellectual, not John Ralston Saul. And Local Matters: A Defence of Dooney's Café and Other Non-Globalized Places, People, and Ideas is a delightful work that covers many topics, from the Toronto streetscape, to Starbucks Corporation, to globalization and poor city planning, things Fawcett is all too uniquely qualified to write about.
Fawcett is someone, as he says, who "accept[s] no tribal affiliations, not with my fellow citizens or with other writers." (68) If he won't march with you under any literary or national banners, it's because he wants you to go it alone, condemned (as writers are) to sift patiently through the data, all eyes and ears for what's good & bad about the world, and arrive at your own viewpoints. So go it alone I will, armed with the inspiration and same zeal for honest critiquing. And the issue I'd really like to explore is just why Brian Fawcett, literary entrepreneur, social activist and plain nice guy, won't write poetry anymore. Though he's listed a set of reasons in a chapter entitled "The Tides Are Caused By The Moon's Gravity, Not By Ours: A Personal Essay on the Future of Poetry", I believe it's this time the sub-text of his entire work: for didn't he try already an openly visible subtext for his most well-known book Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow? And if I search for the causes among areas of personal experience, literary influences and a bad case of global angst, I won't be too far off the mark. I'm convinced, in fact, that the decision not to write really amounts to a silent (but devastating) indictment of the current marketplace of ideas and of the intellectual torpor into which most of us have fallen. With so many more relevant issues to address, poetry may have come to seem a piddling pastime. Or perhaps he's making the even stronger claim that the world just isn't poetical anymore: one thinks, for instance, of Adorno's devastating comment about the death of poetry after Auschwitz.
I'm not all that unfamiliar myself with the temptation to quit writing; I did say I'm in a mood for a literary renaissance of sorts. Why do the Americans have them and we don't? And don't talk to me about Tish. The urge to overturn the tables at Canada Council has been building for some time now. Fawcett would probably say since I'm one of those guys whose writings have "no influence on the political centre or the marketplace" (120) I'm better off casting aspersion from the margins, a nomadic and destabilizing influence, the proverbial shit-disturber. The poetry scene today, in particular, both entices and repels me and it does so because I, literary nomad, don't have what Fawcett seems to have: perhaps the strongest (& ultimately the most therapeutic) metaphor for literary community at his disposal (And I know how fond of metaphors he is). I've always tended to equate state-funded Art (of the kind we have) with the production, and consumption, of second-rate work, a claim I'll defend to the end. If George Grant were alive today (a man whose wisdom I've learned much too late), he'd write a second book entitled Lament for a Literary Nation. But I continue to write anyways, angry a good deal of the time at both the practice and mainstream authors of bad writing in Canada. Fawcett, however, as qualified as he is to wear it, has cast off the poet's mantle and done so because today he speaks from a place that's always eluded me, a utopian hope, at best: the wise enclave of lifelong study combined with the activist's ardor and appreciation of the world as it is.
Yes, I'm a poet and so was Fawcett once. He was there, writing, editing and learning his craft under the likes of Robin Blaser: a pioneering sort of community-builder of the literary scene in Vancouver that's earned him the right to talk about Canadian literary history. Always self-aware and very much his own person from the start (tracing the origin of his first poem to a refusal to kill a cat (111) and his first encounter with the Muses to a terrifying coal shed incident(117)), he describes himself as "solitary, usually independent, but determined to be the investigating messenger of everything that was not me" (112). That he's carved out his own writing niche in areas of social activism is a function not of literary intention (as with too many) but of direct personal experience. The writer's best qualities and impulses just seem blatantly misused when all s/he's interested in is something as pretentious & self-serving as poetry and literary theory. Just too light, frivolous and insubstantial for serious writing.
It's Fawcett's belief that for writers "life is about writing, not about us" (116), as how could it not be when there are very pressing issues for writers to address (like the impact of globalization & multinational corporations on local economies). As city planner, teacher of prison inmates, parent and Toronto activist, he's chosen the path of the real rather than illusorily surreal, or irreal, a type of writing that compels him to be necessarily conscious of coherence and audience and writer interaction: a type of "cosmopolitanism" that he credits his early Vancouver experiences and particularly his Simon Fraser University days with having formed early in him. (147) Fawcett's dropped the ego-stroking, self-indulgent Muses of literary creation (without entirely dismissing them) for more demanding and "pedestrian" attention to precision, research and a sense of responsibility towards the world of readers as they are (118).
Literary influences, and particularly an era of Olson-worship in 60s campus scene, though at times the butt of sophomoric parodying, did impress on Fawcett the necessity to leave nothing unquestioned (in the true spirit of a humanist education); perhaps even more importantly, the need always to keep an ear close to the ground, preferring particulars to the abstract, the absence of which leads to what Fawcett calls a damaging "ground and figure" rhetoric that results in flighty and patently absurd writing. It was this combined humanist questioning and more pragmatic approach to university studies that made poetry seem to embody too much of the excessive bombast and self-aggrandizement of literary theory. And it was that sort of honest self-critiquing that led to the creation of "Serious Iron"magazine (140) in the first place, a healthy and educative outlet for pretty typical student confusion and self-loathing. Olson, the man and literary grandee may have been the primary object of much of this reverential lampooning— the poet-intellectual whose epic Maximus verses were writ large over campus skies— but it was all of them collectively, Olson, Duncan and Blaser, that led Fawcett, and his generation, to a new cosmopolitan vision, impelling them to see "it was better to think cosmologically than globally (as the latter has devolved), and better to think locally than to measure value in terms of nations and the myriad other exclusions that now make up our politics." (145) (It was the sort of effect George Grant and, to a lesser degree, Hans Georg Gadamer had on me in the 70s, kind, generous and clear-sighted men whose graduate seminars I had the privilege of attending).
Fawcett seemed to have got the good Zeitgeist of his day, in a word: unlike that 70s type, say, (to which I'd been prone) that led to "spiritual self-cleansing" (25) and the notorious navel-gazing of most literary productions. The era of self-critical and bigger-than-life (Olson-and Duncan-style) cosmopolitanism has had the result of making Fawcett a critic of globalization, a term not to be confused with the personal and intellectual openness to wider "cosmological" issues that are just not always about us and that lie at the heart of a true world citizenry. It's a recurrent motif in Local Matters, deriving from both his hostility to the advance of postmodernist thought in the 70's and 80's and that early Blaser influence at Simon Fraser. The attention to significant local detail that informs a true literary consciousness is a far cry from the "atomization of political, social and cultural values and enclaves we've experienced since the mid 1970s" (155), pretty good descriptors of a type of writing Fawcett abhors and, more disturbingly, of the almost fanatically spiteful way educated liberals vilify people and causes they don't support.
So why did Brian Fawcett give up poetry? Personally, because of his fear of open markets and a native propensity to sit alone, in Dooney's Café, meditating quietly, believing writers do their best work undistracted by much of the literary & social spectacle outside. And perhaps his early days with the small literary magazine showed him the silliness and impracticality of all literary nouveauté, always impatient to morph into something more noisy and controversial, always a little irrelevant to the lives of real people.
Intellectually, by the important lesson learned at Simon Fraser that a too busy concern with self-expressions of the navel-gazing kind (a favourite expression of Fawcett's), divorced from the wider human cosmos, are a sure segue to the new style of "self-aggrandizing but mainly academic techno-nincompoops" (155) who did actually monopolize writing in the decades leading to the present. The writer's job is, simply stated, "to make the world better and more understandable" (173) rather than join fatuous Writers' Unions and act like the literary lackeys they are. And here I'll throw in my bit, again, about Canada Council and the statism it promotes.
Globally, by the need to see always the bigger picture through a local prism, never substituting fake corporate charity for real "civic responsibility". In a word, to defend always the dignity of "non-globalized places, people and ideas".
Fawcett who won't write poetry because of all of these has also, in my opinion, delivered the most potentially devastating indictment of contemporary life since perhaps George Grant's Lament for a Nation or Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. If he was a little embarrassed with my initial enthusiasm for his early pioneering work, he may now be downright angry at the impudence of an admirer to lay that title of iconoclast on him. But he has smashed a few 'idols' along the way, and I shall name them in closing. The unreflective habits of most academic writing in Canada (what does he call most of the professors he knew: "mediocre clerks"?), arrogant and always Liberal in scope, with the potential sometimes for real virulence; the chic cadre of postmodernist writers, artists & critics (like poor Grant McCracken) who work always by "polemical overkill" (157) and a love for meaningless complexity for its own sake; environmentalism, a movement that Fawcett says ought to give us all pause for the vehemence with which environmentalists talk about sanitizing the world; globalization, a term synonymous in Fawcett's mind with the ascendancy of money and corporatist power and decline of individual freedoms at the state and local levels ("The Purpose of Paranoia"); and computer technology, especially blogs and websites notorious for mostly subjective, poorly-researched and poorly-written work.
