Easter in New York

The circumstances are the poem: Sauser, twenty-four and near destitute in New York in the spring of 1912, wandering the city at Easter, ducking into churches for warmth and finding the Passion story tangled with breadlines, immigrants, and electric light. The verse he wrote runs on long, hammering couplets addressed directly to Christ — reverent and blasphemous in the same breath, medieval prayer-forms filled with subways and tenements. It was the modern city entering French poetry at street level, and he knew what he had: back in Paris he founded a tiny imprint, Les Hommes Nouveaux, to print it that autumn — the first work signed Cendrars.

Its detonation radius was immediate. Apollinaire heard the poem, and 'Zone' — written soon after, with its own godless-modern-city prayer — opened Alcools the following year; a century of scholarship has debated who lit whose fuse, which is itself the measure of the poem's arrival. It is a founding document twice over: the birth of the era's great adventurer-poet, and proof that the expatriate city-poem — the walker, the hunger, the sacred profaned and vice versa — was loose in the world before the Lost Generation ever sailed.

One long poem in driving rhymed couplets: the poet, penniless in New York at Easter, addresses Christ through a night-walk among the city's poor — immigrants, workers, thieves, the sick — asking where the Passion lives in the electric metropolis, and finding the answer in the gutter and nowhere, by dawn, in himself. The medieval hymn made modern, or the modern city made liturgy — the poem refuses to choose.

Twenty minutes' reading, best aloud — the couplets are built to pound.