In September, Long Poem Magazine is set to publish an appraisal of Christopher Logue's longer works.
Here are the opening paragraphs which were cut for focusing on his biography too much:
Logue's Long Players - The Girls, New Numbers and War Music
As a boy,
Christopher Logue attended the hyper-religious De La Salle Brothers’ St John’s
College in Southsea. It was there that Brother John told him,
Every part of a cathedral, including its roof, is holy. Few besides
God will ever see the rooftop carvings, while the common people, whose labour
paid for the building, knew in their hearts that the carvings were up there,
safe in the sight of God until Judgement day.
These words struck
home: ‘From now on, whatever I did, I would do in that spirit. For its own
sake. For no other reason. As the medieval carvers had carved for God. No
justification was needed. None would be offered. That I did not know what I
wanted to do was unimportant.’[i]
This adamance and
singularity held Logue in good, or bad, stead all his life. Why should he share
the pages of a book with two other Penguin
New Poets? He was principled: it was he who wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement detailing instances
of what he considered anti-semitism in T.S. Eliot’s writing; he who turned down
an approach for poems by Brian Patten which had the gall to address him as
‘Chris;’ and he whose autobiography – the terrific Prince Charming (1999) – led A.N. Wilson to write: ‘This is a book
that makes me think not merely that poets are shits, but that I really hate
left-wing people.’[ii]
Logue was a
one-off: his military service ended in court-martial, jail and the loss of
sight in his left eye; his friendships numbered Alexander Trocchi, Ken Tynan
and Lyndsay Anderson among them; his loose adaptation of love poems by Neruda
was released as an EP with backing by the Tony Kinsey
Quintet, and produced by George Martin; his satirical songs were performed by
Annie Ross at Peter Cook’s The
Establishment; and his anti-nuclear lobby ‘To My Fellow Artists’ – issued free,
weighted down by a stone beside a sign reading ‘please take one’ – was the
first poster poem.
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