View+

ISBN: 978-1-926794-00-6
6x9 paperback, 160 pp
$21.50 CDN

Since the early 1990s, Montreal’s David McGimpsey has been producing his unique, pop-acculturated poetry and fiction, indebted in equal parts to TV shows such as Hawaii Five-0 and Charlie’s Angels as well as Shakespearean tragedy and the Miltonic elegy. His poems and performances have garnered a wide readership and popular acclaim across North America. Population Me: Essays on David McGimpsey gathers together, for the first time, a collection of essays that serve to highlight and explicate the scope and complexity of McGimpsey’s poetic practice. The collected essays (by lauded poets and scholars such as Nick Mount, Jason Camlot and Elizabeth Bachinsky) examine McGimpsey’s various positions on literary history, class, nationalism, humor, love, and aesthetics, all of which are often mutually imbricated in McGimpsey’s work. The book concludes with an entertaining and enlightening in-depth interview with McGimpsey, where he discusses, with all the wit and keen critical acumen we’ve come to expect, everything from his early experiences growing up in Montreal’s East-End to the prospect of sympathy in and through poetry. Population Me is a timely addition to Canadian letters and a collection that makes clear McGimpsey’s significant contribution to contemporary Canadian literature.


CONTENTS

Introduction: The Sympathetic Core
ALESSANDRO PORCO

The Passion of David McGimpsey
NICK MOUNT

The Couch Poetato: Television People in the Poetry of David McGimpsey
JASON CAMLOT

Satiric Play in David McGimpsey’s Sport-Centered Poems
DAVID VANDERWERKEN

Objects, Still and Moving: Culture and Agency in the Short Fictions of David McGimpsey
L.E. VOLLICK

Codes of Maturity and the Impasse of Rock
ALESSANDRO PORCO

CanLit™: National Branding and Canadian Literary Identity in David McGimpsey’s Poetics
COURTNEY RICHARDSON

An Appetite Abroad; or, David McGimpsey’s Burgerworld and the Map of Contemporary Poetry
V. NICHOLAS LOLORDO

Disaster Poem
PAUL VERMEERSCH

On David McGimpsey’s Sitcom
ELIZABETH BACHINSKY

“Gone A-Whalin’”: An Interview with David McGimpsey
JASON CAMLOT AND ALESSANDRO PORCO

REVIEW QUOTES:

"What is valid about McGimpsey's work is that he himself is not dismissing or endorsing the products or moments of pop culture triviality that appears in his stuff. He's simply a part of the pinball operation, the trajectory if you will. The essays in Population Me are well-crafted and varied, and cover all of the author's greatest hits to date."                                                                                                

—Broken Pencil

"David McGimpsey is a cultural omnivore who embraces 'a Tijuana bar or... Mahler’s 6th Symphony' (137). This revelation may not impress confirmed snobs or slobs. Fortunately, his work has inspired this anthology, which takes him to the next level—that of inspected and graded literary product. Bon appétit!"

—Prairie Fire