On The Abundancy of Poets & Poetics

Excerpt From: "Poets aplenty, but who's reading the verse?"
---------------------------------------------------------By JAMES ADAMS


[Brian Fawcett]. ... stopped publishing his poetry in the early 1980s in part because of the lack of an audience, and in part because he had grown weary of the "self-drama" of "the private soul against the public world" that poetry entails.

A former Vancouverite now living in Toronto, Fawcett, 62, continues to write poems, usually once every two or three weeks, sometimes for four hours late at night. By the end of each year, "I've added five or six to the oeuvre," he said this week. But now "it's not about making aesthetic objects; it's like a pitcher practising a curve ball." Some works he's been revising for 15 years.

"I can't see any reason to publish because there's more people out there writing it than reading it. . . . We have so much information that we don't want and don't need in this world and writers have to take a measure of that, I think. If you don't have anything new to say, don't say it."

Still, it's unlikely any cessation of the poetic impulse will occur, he said. Just the opposite, in fact. "Poets appear in numbers according to exactly how confusing the world is. It's sourced in crisis. After the serenity of the post-Second World War world, with Vietnam everyone was writing poetry." A similar trauma has happened as a result of Sept. 11. "Suddenly, the poets are out again."

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source: The Globe & Mail
November 20, 2006

Came by a link to this article over at C. Dale's

Brian Fawcett's recent books are: The Secret Journal of Alexander Mackenzie (1985) Capital Tales (1984) and My Career with the Leafs. (1982), all from Talonbooks in Vancouver. Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow, was published in 1986 by Talon books, and by Grove Press & McMillan, U.S. and Penguin, G.B. Public Eye:An Investigation into the Disappearance of the World (1990) is from Grove Press (U.S.) and Harper Collins (Can), Unusual Circumstances/Interesting Times (1991) is from New Star inVancouver, The Compact Garden (1992) is from Camden House, Gender Wars: A Novel and Some Conversation About Sex and Gender (1994) is from Somerville House. The Disbeliever’s Dictionary, was published in October 1997 by Somerville. He is a past editor of Books in Canada, a former columnist for the Globe & Mail, chairman of the Writers Union of Canada Charter 94 Committee and has written articles and reviews formost of Canada’s major newspapers and magazines.