‘Both a poet and a painter’: typography and textual images in Christopher Logue’s War Music

Abstract

The work of the British poet Christopher Logue is characterized by variation, collaboration, and intermedia projects. His output includes poetry set to jazz, printed poster-poems, public poetry performances, film scripts, collaborations with artists, and translations from Portuguese, German and, most significantly, ancient Greek. War Music, an ‘account of Homer’s Iliad’ according to its subtitle, became Logue’s life’s work, eclipsing many of his earlier projects. But collisions of word, image, and sound—the intermedia formats that characterize his early work—endure in Logue’s Homeric translations in the form of radical typographic experiments and textual images, such as inch-high capital letters marking the arrival of the god Apollo, and graphic shapes formed by variation in line lengths. This article demonstrates that War Music is a key text in the intersection of translation and visual poetry, which can be best understood in dialogue with other forms such as concrete poetry and the text-inspired art of Cy Twombly.