The Gazette: Sitcom re-casts the poetry mold!
As suggested by the compound title, Montrealer David McGimpsey's book Sitcom is poetry as cold fusion, combining elements that, at first glance, don't seem to belong together: traditional poetic form and pop-culture content, literary allusion and TV, playfulness and seriousness, respect and irreverence, the lyrical and the deadpan. It's poetry that should not work, but does, brilliantly.
McGimpsey's voice is so original and subversive that he is practically re-casting the poetry mold, pushing the boundaries of literary acceptability, and doing so without a hint of pretentiousness.
He gets special pleasure out of poking fun at academic stuffiness. For instance, the poem titled B-/C+ begins, 'This is a most interesting paper,/ David. You have a rare sympathy for both Osric and Arthur Carlson -/ intriguingly placed in the middle/ of your paper on W.H. Auden.'
If you didn't know that Arthur Carlson was the bumbling boss of WKRP in Cincinnati, you might also have trouble with the poem Absolution, which asks the eternal question 'Mary-Ann or Ginger?' And there are dozens of other references to '60s and '70s television shows like Mary Tyler Moore, The Rockford Files and Hawaii Five-O, to name a few. McGimpsey is an alchemist who turns the accumulated silt of commercial culture into literary treasure.
After reading his culture-melding poem Montreal, I ran to the shelf for A.M. Klein's 1944 bi-linguistic masterpiece of the same name. Reading them side by side, a thought popped into my head. If Klein was Groucho Marx, then McGimpsey would be Hawkeye Pierce searching for the crossword definition of the Yiddish word 'vants.'
If you don't know what that means, it's okay, just call it the McGimpsey effect. You start making strange connections. I could write a dissertation, but better just to enjoy these exceptional poems.
