Guest Poem: The Modern by Chris McCabe

1904

Rimbaud’s stickleback skull
claws from a Lambeth puddle

his scales riffle hologrammatic
over Apollinaire’s ID card

as if he, Guillame, could head Northbound
to Royal College Street

and X-ray his jawline for the dead kid’s bones
rattling down inside his clavicle,
He walks from an Islington redbrick
checks his notebook for directions
Retour à Angel
Tube en face passé
Demander Clapham Road
4d

as if London is the metric of the mind
French poets arrive
by night-boat to Victoria

Southbound to Clapham
for fog & depression
for “great tits & a behind”

Rimbaud for a bullet’s vowel
his pink cock in some milk

1918

who puts the crows in trench coats
hooded like Germans

on Grosvenor Road SW1
a pink balloon scrotums the rails

- Owen strewn maitre d’ - Apollinaire snotted by Eros -
chaffinches arson their waistcoats,
natural gases in the bowels of a tree
- Picabia Napoleon’d in a sling -
Celine plugs his wounds with London soot -
the fog through which
Mallarme said
God cannot see -

O Tommy, Tommy Boys

it’s 1-nil carrion 2-nil corvus

(reprinted with the publisher's permission)

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   To stave off post-Election blues I'm pleased to feature a poem this weekend from Chris McCabe's Speculatrix, one of the most compelling books of poetry to have appeared last year, with its surreal take on the historical layerings of London and its repositioning of contemporary culture as a macabre Jacobean revenge-tragicomedy. 'The Modern' plays with a juncture I'm particularly interested in: the presence of French poets like Rimbaud and Apollinaire in London during the years of Modernism's inception (also notoriously catalysed by the First World War) and the influence they drew from locales radically altered or non-existent in today's city.