Poetry for Pussy Riot
Just received word that my poem The Blackbird, which I contributed as part of the Poets for Pussy Riot project, has gone live on the English PEN website - you can find it, along with an ever-increasing number of other fine poems in support of the band, by clicking here and having a good look round.
The Blackbird comes from my debut collection Turning. If you've read that, you'll know that the poem is dedicated in the book to the memory of Anthony Hodge, a wonderful artist from Horsley, near Stroud, who died a few years ago.
I chose it as my contribution to the Pussy Riot project because, when I was asked by Sophie Mayer if I wanted to contribute, I thought that it could, reapplied, be a subtly, gently subversive poem. Poetry that comes out of suppressive regimes often disguises its message - this is something I learned very early in life, listening on the one hand to my mother reading Elaine Feinstein's translations of the Russian poets for Radio 3 and on the other from the book Cart and Cwidder by Diana Wynne Jones.
Diana's book features a family of troubadour singers, many of them red headed (hence my strong identification), passing messages for the resistance in the fictional world of Dalemark. The eldest son, Dagner, writes a beautiful lyric about a blackbird that his father slams and tells him never to sing again, because it unthinkingly utilises the subversive nature codes of the rebels. That book, and that moment in it, has haunted me for years, far above all of her other books. Which is saying something, as she is the author who defined my childhood and consequently my adult life. If you haven't read her work, you really should. To your children or just for yourself.
So when it came to it, my Blackbird seemed a natural fit, especially as Anthony Hodge was a deliciously anarchic figure in my life, always seeming to pop out of the hedgerows at opportune moments with challenging conversations, laughter and a measure of delicious craziness that deserved to be celebrated.
I am certain he'd approve of the appropriation of a poem dedicated to his memory for use as a message of support for a band whose unwarranted castigation and imprisonment just for making a challenging statement is an appalling stain on the heart of Russia's dreaming.
--An update: here's The Blackbird translated into Russian by Dmitry Simanovsky.
The Blackbird by Adam Horovitz, translated into Russian by Dmitry Simanovsky
