Post Live Aid, I’ve always viewed the charity concert or album with cynicism. Sure, the cause is worthy but you wonder whether the preening stars are there for that, or for themselves. Down at English Pen, Sophie Mayer has been busy editing Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot. This collection is different. Sure, there’s a celebrity contribution from Phill Jupitus but, as a stand-up comedian, he knows the value of free speech only too well. Besides, having a poem published in an anthology like this hardly smacks of self-promotion. As George Szirtes writes in the introduction, ‘I am fully aware that [the anthology] is unlikely to affect the course of events in any measurable way […] It might be a consolation to Pussy Riot, and to those for whom they speak, that there are many people – including poets – who listen to them and talk back in support’. The harshness of the sentence and the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for Putin looks, to a Western liberal, indefensible. Szirtes goes on to say that, ‘Since Putin seems assured of the power, it is rather surprising that the courts should have decided to act as severely as they did. […] The charge of ‘hooliganism’ is rather like the one of ‘parasitism’ that was directed at the Nobel Prize winning poet, Josef Brodsky in 1969. It is broadly seen as a charge of convenience. In that sense Pussy Riot has grown from a minor nuisance to a global cause. They are up there with Brodsky. A crushing and oppressive two-year sentence becomes very big news. The result is that Pussy Riot look, as they actually are, highly intelligent while Russia looks cruel and stupid’.

The anthology is broad in range. At one end of the spectrum, Andrew Bailey’s clerihew Poem for Pussy Riot is clean, classic, polemical and drips with bile. ‘O presidential hands, that can / break tigers and bend frying pans, / you know from judo too much force / may be revisited on its source’. The seething anger and stanza form nod to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy, a reminder of an age when British poetry really had some bite. It’s interesting to note how often the poets in this anthology use the rhyming couplet, satire’s straight razor, to sharpen their spleen. So, in one sense these poems are of the moment but, at the same time, some of them could have been penned by the likes of Alexander Pope.

Aoife Mannix‘s ‘The Eye of the Needle’ penetrates to the heart of the Russian Orthodox Church’s hypocrisy.  ‘I bet when Jesus went into the temple / and started knocking over stalls, / there were those who said this is just / some punk from Bethlehem pulling a / PR stunt’. For my money, Mannix nails the betrayal of Christian values at the heart of the church’s decision to collude with the Russian state. The word ‘Punk’ works hard here, capturing Jesus’ back to basics, anti-establishment rabble-rousing and suggests the title of the Pussy Riot song ‘Punk Prayer: Mother of God Drive Putin Away.’ (Given this title, didn’t Pussy Riot attend church to pray?). However, the word also means prostitute, suggesting the indignation of many Russians at this sacrilegious, naked performance. As the poem lists Putin’s material goods, it builds to an angry crescendo, terminating with the satirical slap of a rhyming couplet as Putin is addressed: ‘you are just an echo of that other Pilate dictator / who also thought he could cling to power / by torturing those that seemed weak / but knew the strength of turning the other cheek’.

Phill Jupitus also spots the irony here, observing in Girl Banned that ‘As a child / I sang in church’. Of course, when you stop and think about it, the Christian message is a revolutionary one and to sing it in church is to preach that revolution. Jupitus’s series of allusions to faceless bubblegum pop girl bands demonstrates Pussy Riot’s value: they’re a real band with the courage to provoke an authoritarian regime. ‘But cold hard Vladimir / Remained unmoved / Called their rock folly / so they weren’t / Girls allowed’.

Jody Porter works to great effect with Pussy Riot’s Wikipedia entry in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussy_Riot. ‘The neutrality of this article is disputed,’ she begins. ‘Please do not remove this message / until the dispute is resolved’. Porter’s poem succinctly draws the battle lines, as human rights lawyers argue that Pussy Riot’s arrest is a distortion of the law and a blow for free speech, whilst many Russians believe that their custodial sentence was a fair one.

However, the anthology’s scope is broader even than this and, in Chella Quint‘s In Vogue, she exploits the faux contemporary demotic of the fashion world to point the finger sternly at us, at our degeneracy and bandwagon hopping. ‘I need to get an awesome balaclava quick. / It’s London Fashion Week and they’re totally sick’, she begins. And suddenly we’re back where we started, watching Patsie and Edina scouring Bond Street for couture balaclavas.

Visit English Pen, decide what you think the anthology’s worth and download your copy now.

Related articles

• A Riot of Pussy poetry! (thefword.org.uk)
• Pussy Riot appeal adjourned in Moscow (euronews.com)
• Hang on in there Pussy Riot! (andrewazzopardi.org)
• Pro-Putin youth group attacks Pussy Riot (upi.com)