Coach House Books asks David McGimpsey a few things about Sitcom

CH: You seem to have an abiding fondness for TV. Is this true? What do you love about it?

DM: Your tv friends never let you down. When was the last time Chad Michael Murray, star of One Tree Hill, said he didn't have time for you or your new book of poems? Never! I'm sure I don't love tv more than most – it's just that I am happier to bring up the subject of Tootie [from The Facts of Life] at a cocktail party than many are. It's hard not to notice the allure and obvious cultural weight of tv. When you consider the behaviour of people for the last sixty years, the evidence is pretty overwhelming: everybody loves tv. Loving poetry is harder to defend.

CH: What's remarkable about your work is the way you're able to marry esoteric pop culture with references to Serious Literature like Shakespeare, and you write in traditional forms like the sonnet. Can you tell us about this strategy?

DM: I love the character-driven rhetoric of a Shakespeare soliloquy or of a classic Browning poem, and I love all high-minded attempts of characters to actualize themselves through speech. Giving a slight edge of poetic high-mindedness to characters who are living lives that are not noticeably Shakespearian or even ‘serious’ is my way of valuing the actual experience of life as I know it. The strategy was not so much to self-consciously create a peanut-butter cup out of two seemingly disparate ingredients, but to celebrate and despair my surroundings in a familiar and energetic manner – inspired by favourite poets without letting things flag into archaic givens. The forms, if anything, were inspiration to the book’s sense of contemporary commentary.

CH: We think your juxtaposition of Suddenly Susan and Timon of Athens is genius. What led you to connect those two?

DM: Depression! It's one thing to say you've seen Seinfeld or The Simpsons, but it's hard to explain why one has watched all the episodes of a show like Joey. Suddenly Susan and Timon of Athens are the same: both are unloved in comparison to Cheers or Hamlet, and we only come to them through a love for Cheers or Hamlet.

CH: CanLit generally doesn't like to mix humour and seriousness. Do you think you're taken less seriously as a poet because you do?

DM: Probably, but I hate saying so. Part of the challenge of trying to write out funny things is, in some ways, to try to make it look easy and natural. That's why people always see stand-ups and say ‘Oh, I can do that!’ It's no hardship, though. Most people who know my work see how the humour of the poems is measured in their seriousness anyway and, besides, that people have found my work funny at all is a great compliment! If that keeps me away from enjoying the rewards of seriousness that make other Canadian poets such a sparkling, shiny, happy lot, well, I'll just have to continue to risk that.

CH: What's your favourite TV show, past or present?

DM: The Flintstones was my primer (like a lot of kids in Montreal, I watched it at noon on Channel 12 nearly every day), but the shows I like now are Pardon the Interruption and Curb Your Enthusiasm (which sound oddly similar). My all-time favourite show is probably Hawaii Five-O.

CH: And, what's your favourite work of Serious Literature?

DM: Milton's ‘Lycidas.’

CH: Is there any point of commonality between those last two answers?

DM: Not unless Milton cut out a long section predicting the chances of the Kansas City Chiefs in the 2008 Super Bowl. But, actually, of course there is: love, character, the individual suffering, the pains of friendship (Fred and Barney = Milton and King), the whole ball of wax.

CH: Why the sonnet? Why the soliloquy?

DM: The sonnet was the first kind of poem I ever wrote, and I wrote lots of them. The first poems I ever published were sonnets about Batman. I've always liked them: the immediacy, the tightness, the rhyming of ‘malade’ with ‘egg salad.’ In the soliloquy I love the great sweep of dramatic irony: the character is saying something but is being pushed somewhere else, the faults of character presenting a vulnerability that the effort of speech can only bruise.

CH: How does it affect your poems to teach creative writing?

DM: I'd like to think it humbles me and returns me, in the best possible way, to the places where my poems began. It also makes me consistently realize how much fun it is to write poetry instead of folding sweaters in the Bay.

CH: We see from your bio that you write about sandwiches for En Route Magazine. If your poetry was a sandwich, what kind of sandwich would it be?

DM: A steak sandwich – with a zesty sauce.

CH: If you were a sitcom character, who would you be?

DM: One of the anonymous suitors in The Golden Girls.