Christopher Logue

Christopher Logue CBE (* 23. November 1926 in Portsmouth , † 2. December 2011 in London ) was a British poet who above all through his epic War Music , a modern rendition of Homer's ancient ancient Greek depiction of the siege of Troy in the Trojan War , known has been. He has received the Whitbread Book Award , Cholmondeley Award and Griffin Poetry Prize , among others .

Life

School and military time

Logue, the son of a postal worker, grew up in his native Portsmouth and was sentenced to six months suspended by a juvenile court for stealing adult magazines Men Only and The Naturist . After attending Catholic St John's College in Southsea and Prior Park College in Bath , he completed his education at Portsmouth Grammar School .

After completing his school education, he began his military service in the Royal Regiment of Scotland , the so-called "Black Watch", with which he moved to Palestine in 1945 . After selling stolen pay books to one of his comrades, he was arrested and sentenced by a military tribunal to imprisonment, which he served in Palestine and Scotland . He then performed a number of low-paid jobs as a parking attendant and receptionist in a dental practice and attempted suicide .

Parisian years and first literary work

In 1951 he settled in Paris and became part of the literary scene there, which also included the Scottish author Alexander Trocchi . Logue joined the Trocchi-led group of editors of the literary magazine Merlin , the first edition of which appeared one of Logue's poems . In 1953 his debut collection of poems, Wand and Quandrant, was published as a special issue of the magazine. However, since he could not make a living from his lyrical works, he wrote pornographic works for the Olympia Press, published by Maurice Girodias .

Under the pseudonym Count Palmiro Vicarion, he wrote a number of lewd limericks for Girodias, who had published, among other things, Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita in 1955 . Due to his feelings about his own sexual shyness, which preoccupied him all his life, he wanted to commit a second suicide attempt, from which he was however stopped by Trocchi.

Return to London and literary success

On his return to London in 1956, with the by John Osborne 's first stage work Look Back in Anger initiated Revolution to the British theaters coincided, he met Kenneth Tynan , a well-known theater critic of the Observer and later chief dramaturge of the Royal National Theater , and the director Lindsay Anderson with whom he worked in 1959 on the staging of the musical The Lily White Boys at the Royal Court Theater .

In 1958 he took part in the first Aldermaston march of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and was also a member of the "Committee of the Hundred" founded by Bertrand Russell , to which personalities such as John Osborne, Lindsay Anderson, Doris Lessing and John Berger belonged to the nuclear policy of Great Britain and to influence its relations with the United States . He was sentenced to a month's imprisonment for failing to comply with a judicial ban on demonstration .

Was music and jazz poetry

A basic form of his main work was music , an expressive modern rendition of Homer's ancient ancient Greek representation of the siege of Troy in the Trojan War, was established in 1959 under the title of Achilles and the River as a radio program aired. Louis MacNeice said of Logue's Homer poem that "blood was never more bloody, or fate was never more deadly". Although Logue stayed true to Homer's approach, he made the epic his own work by redrawing the parables and the bloody details, in which he reinvented original passages and characters. He himself saw his work as an "account" of the Iliad , while literary critics referred to it as a paraphrase of the Iliad or Logues Homer. His merit was the revival of the dramatic narrative style in the ancient work in a contemporary, sometimes cinematic style.

In the early 1960s he also undertook attempt in the Jazz Poetry like Red Bird (1960), which by the British Broadcasting Corporation was funded (BBC) and the producer of the Beatles , George Martin for EMI was recorded. The reworking of Pablo Neruda's poems on jazz arrangements by Tony Kinsey and Bill Le Sage contained in the album Logues were later sung by Annie Ross at The Establishment club in Soho .

Due to the great interest authored Logue a sequel titled The Death of Patroclus (1963), with the actors Vanessa Redgrave and Alan Dobie on a record with the support of Douglas Cleverdon was recorded, the previously Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas with Acting for the BBC radio program.

Creative crisis and later work

He later held poetry readings with Arnold Wesker to workers in factory halls with limited success. He had greater success again in 1965 with a poetic happening in the Royal Albert Hall with the participation of Allen Ginsberg , Michael Horovitz and Adrian Mitchell . In the following years he also wrote numerous poems in the New Statesman and The Times Literary Supplement . His poem Be Not Too Hard (1967) achieved widespread fame through the version written by Donovan for the soundtrack of the film Poor Cow by Ken Loach , which was also sung by Joan Baez on her album Joan (1967) and in 1974 by Manfred Mann's Earth Band was covered on the album The Good Earth .

After a writing break caused by a depression , his main work War Music appeared in a new edition in 1981 . This was followed by the books Kings (1991), The Husbands (1995), the autobiography Prince Charming (1999), All Day Permanent Red (2003) and Cold Calls (2005).

After receiving the Griffin Poetry Prize for Homer: War Music in 2002 , Cold Calls received both the Cholmondeley Award and the Whitbread Book Award in 2005. In addition, Logue, who had been married to the author, critic and biographer Rosemary Hill since 1985 and accepted a pension from Queen Elizabeth II's civil list in 2002 , was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2007.

Publications

• Wand and quadrant , 1953
• The weekdream sonnets , 1955
• Devil, maggot and son , 1956
• The man who told his love , 1958
• Songs , 1959
• Songs from The lily-white boys , 1960
• Patrocleia , 1962
• The arrival of the poet in the city , 1963
• Logue's AB C , 1966
• Selections from a correspondence between an Irishman and a rat , 1966
• True stories , 1966
• Hermes flew to Olympus , 1968
• New numbers , 1969
• The words of Christopher Logue's Establishment songs etcetera , 1966
• The girls , 1969
• For Talitha, 1941-1971 , 1971
• The Isles of Jessamy , 1971
• Duet for mole and worm , 1972
• Twelve cards , 1972
• What , 1972
• Singles , 1973
• Christopher Logue's true stories from Private eye , 1973
• Urbanal , 1975
• Puss in boots , 1976
• Abecedary , 1977
• Red bird , 1979
• The magic circus , 1979
• The children's book of comic verse , 1979
• Bumper Book of True Stories , 1980
• Was music , 1981
• Ode to the dodo , 1981
• London in Verse , 1983
• Sweet and Sour , 1983
• Fluff , 1984
• Lucky dust , 1985
• London airport , 1988
• Kings , 1991
• The husbands , 1994
• Selected Poems , 1996
• Prince charming , 1999
• All day permanent red , 2003
• Cold Calls , 2005

in German language

• Dear Ratz, magic something! , 1976
• Circus Miraculous , 1979

literature

• George Ramsden: Christopher Logue. A bibliography, 1952-1997 , 1997, ISBN 0952953439

Web links

• Literature by and about Christopher Logue in the catalog of the German National Library
• openlibrary.org
• Christopher Logue obituary: Poet whose War Music was a stark rendition of Homer's Iliad . In: The Guardian (December 3, 2011)