Event raves about Sitcom

I am in Montreal and have borrowed a copy of local writer David McGimpsey's Sitcom from a friend. I read it as we walk up Rachel Street toward the optometrist's at Saint-Denis where I am to pick up my new glasses. The city is all around us as we sit at the reception, surrounded by glass and, just beyond the glass, snow and crowded streets. We read:

Her sisters used an acne soap called Snap,

a tubbed gritty mess which sat like a puck

and washed like a thousand jagged rocks --

the kind of soap refinery workers used

before punching out and heading for home.

That flat, matter-of-fact voice, those clunky cadences jacked up with that unforgettably clear imagery -- we both love the lines so much, even the optometrist notices. Later in the day, I can't stop repeating the word poi or scanning McGimpsey's lines. I talk about the book with my friend. We say we think it is a perfect book.

To my mind, the perfect book sets out to do a thing and then does it, preferably to my delight. In Sitcom, McGimpsey pours a healthy does of working class culture -- can we also say pop culture? -- into a leisure-class mould. The desired effect? Perhaps to make that culture palatable to a wider audience than, say, those dear 800 souls in Canada who buy poetry and subscribe to literary magazines. If this, indeed, is McGimpey's goal, he's succeeded. Here is McGimpsey's 'crossover' book.

McGimpsey's work suggests that to offer insight, one needn't philosophize; one need only respond to the television and those people with whom we watch it -- for it appears McGimpsey had to actually know something about people before he wrote this book. From Coriolanus to 'The Happy Bun,' McGimpsey's gaze is refreshingly outward, while still allowing for a generous dose of self-deprecation.

McGimpsey's work is accessible, insightful and technically compelling, but what is it that really attracts the reader to Sitcom? Easy. McGimpsey doesn't seem to have quashed the notion that a poem can actually be entertaining. That is, poems can be full of interesting facts, characters and situations. And these characters can be explored with compression and a sense of humour rather than leggy, prescribed earnestness. This approach has been the model for prime-time TV, and now it is also the model for this very moving book of poems. Charlie Chaplin said, 'Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease for pain.' But David McGimpsey says, 'In the future, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese/ will become so cheesy we will no longer/ know sadness.' Perhaps the tonic comprises both.