Chris McCabe

Chris McCabe is a poet and the current National Poetry Librarian.

‘I first visited the library with a day return train ticket from Liverpool. Two years later, in 2002, I was lucky to get a job as a library assistant and on my first day at work I met poet and musician Ivor Cutler. I later found out that Ivor’s visits to the National Poetry Library was the inspiration for Franz Ferdinand’s song ‘Jacqueline’, the namesake of the song being a previous library assistant (‘Jacqueline was seventeen / Working on a desk / When Ivor / Peered above a spectacle…’).

‘Since then, I have made so many discoveries of poets I couldn’t live without, from first opening Barry MacSweeney’s Pearl to finding Rosemary Tonks’ weathered editions about 1960s underground London life. These past collections are continuously built upon, with the arrival of dozens of new books each week. Every time I come to work I feel that the next discovery is waiting to be found.’