Words

Sitcom
by David McGimpsey
Coach House Books: Toronto, 2007
88 pp. $13.95 (paperback)

Poetry is not generally thought of as a vehicle for posing the eternal question, “Ginger or Maryann?” or to contemplate the centrality of “Hawaii Five-O” within the cultural milieu of our postmodern existence.

For David McGimpsey, however, these are just the sort of subjects that are most suitable to poetry.

“Sitcom” is McGimpsey’s latest collection of poems, joining “Lardcake” (ECW Press, 1996), “Dogboy” (ECW Press, 1998), and “Hamburger Valley, California” (ECW Press, 2001) on his growing bibliography. “Certifiable” (Insomniac Press, 2005) a zany and hilarious collection of his fiction, preceded “Sitcom.” The title was seen by many as a reasonably accurate description of McGimpsey’s overall condition. (Disclosure: David McGimpsey is a professional acquaintance, and I think he is one of the funniest people I have ever met.)

McGimpsey’s only non-fiction academic venture is “Imagining Baseball: America’s Pastime and Popular Culture” (Indiana University Press, 2000), a brilliant and insightful look at baseball as sport and literary subject, in which he offers as much insight into the place of baseball in American culture as anything published in the last half-century.

A native of Montreal, McGimpsey teaches creative writing at Concordia University in the city. He is a singer, songwriter, poet and comedian, and he has been a commentator on popular culture for the CBC and a number of print outlets. He has a sharp eye for the odd, zany, mundane and banal, and can wrap them into a poem with humor, bite and profundity. He leaves his readers dizzy with delight while admiring his critical insight.

The last six lines from “Guelphadelphia” about a college girl from Guelph offer this character analysis:

but it came together in wet winter
when she said, ‘Let’s not even be buddies.’
Considering she didn’t know Buddy Ebsen
and quoted lines from Sex and the City,
it was pretty easy not to be her friend.

Although humor is his weapon of choice, McGimpsey’s poems can at the same time be deadly serious and filled with the sadness arising out of the harsh loneliness in our world of trash-glitter and stone cold “human” relationships.

Pop-culture icons meet classical literature in McGimpsey’s highly sophisticate juxtapositions. At times the clash inherent in the pairings is blinding, and at other times you are left knee-deep in silliness wondering what the question might have been.

In McGimpsey’s universe it would seem as if Gilligan’s Island is a place where the guideposts to the good life reside, if only they could be deciphered. Occult wisdom comes from the mouth of Mister Ed. Elvis is the key to all understanding, a god-like personage worthy of worship. The absurd is the norm, and the norm is absurd.

Consider these fragments:

Mister Ed appears in “Timon.”

I know the episodes of Mr. Ed,
The timeless sitcom about a talking horse,
Like the back of Ed’s hoof. The one where Ed
dreams he’s a studly soap opera doctor,
making all the housewives swoon,
or where Ed becomes a Lincolnphile
and attempts to free all the caged birds
in Los Angeles.

At the end of “Susan #42″ we get this throwaway line about hockey:

Susan prepares for a new love interest:
straight-talking Kenny ‘The Hammer’ Fleming,
a hockey goon sent down to the minors
for once daring to try to score a goal.

At the opening of “Susan #43″ Kenny offers another insight:

‘Dave Schultz’s cruel beating of Dale Rolfe,’
Kenny tells Susan ‘opened up my eyes
to hockey’s beauty and what it means
to be Canadian.”

McGimpsey’s homage to Playboy includes “Turn-ons” where he speculates on the kind of pornography “Love” would read. Would it be hardcore or something of the Playboy variety featuring a Playmate from East Iowa State “raising her skirt toward the vast plains/from a window in the school library?”

Love’s turn-ons are “mind reading, ice cream, and making grand apologies for simple faults.” As for turn-offs, they include “pushy people, the D word, and (of course) unmentholated cigarettes.”

McGimpsey closes with a question: “Tell me, within the city’s teeming throng/does Love spend me-time shopping for thongs?”

In “Snap” there is a troubled young woman obsessed with an acne soap by that name. Among other things she is a songwriter:

She plucked out songs about the grip of death,
about the need to be alone, and a spoof
about Jesus Christ coming back to earth
just to enter a chili cook-off:

She is disappointed with the result and judges his five-alarm sauce suitable “for pussies.”

Very little escapes McGimpsey’s jaundiced eye. There are riffs on Canada, on Montreal, on professors. He is overtaken by the power of the Axe deodorant ads, which he can not resist. In truth, who could?

In “Summerland” he deals with this promise of modern life:

“In the future, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese/will become so cheesy we will no longer/know sadness.” Cigarettes will make a “post-cancer” comeback and “Philip Morris/ will produce a smoke that will last longer/ than it takes Neptune to circle the sun, /or however long it takes Sting to have sex.”

There are a series of poems dealing with Jack Lord, McGarrett and “Hawaii Five-O.” A poem titled “Voice-Over” offers a mesmerizing string of references for “The Tony Danza Show” — Mary Tyler Moore, Rogaine, Hurricane Katrina, a plethora of other brand names — and finally hones in on loneliness and death evoking the memories of an evening with a lap dancer.

McGimpsey’s poetry is clever, smart and funny. There is a good deal of anger, some biting social criticism, and more than a little sadness. It is full of life and haunted by death, and the product of a mind that processes what the eye delivers in ways that are at times hilarious, beautiful and often quite depressing.

There is all of this and much much more, as they say on TV. One can only assume that operators are standing by.