Kate Tempest announces they are non-binary, changes name to Kae

August 6, 2020, 9:37 am

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Performance poet, writer and musician said they had previously ‘tried to be what I thought others wanted me to be so as not to risk rejection’

The musician and poet formerly named Kate Tempest has changed their name to Kae Tempest, and announced they are non-binary.

In the announcement on Instagram, Tempest said they were changing the pronouns they use, from she and her to they and them. Their new name is pronounced like the letter K. They wrote:

I’ve been struggling to accept myself as I am for a long time. I have tried to be what I thought others wanted me to be so as not to risk rejection. This hiding from myself has led to all kinds of difficulties in my life. And this is a first step towards knowing and respecting myself better. I’ve loved Kate. But I am beginning a process and I hope you’ll come with me … [Kae is] an old English word that means jay bird. Jays are associated with communication, curiosity, adaptation to new situations and COURAGE which is the name of the game at the moment. It can also mean jackdaw which is the bird that symbolises death and rebirth. Ovid said the jackdaw brought the rain. Which I love. It has its roots in the Latin word for rejoice, be glad and take pleasure. And I hope to live more that way each day … This is a time of great reckoning. Privately, locally, globally. For me, the question is no longer ‘when will this change’ but ‘how far am I willing to go to meet the changes and bring them about in myself.’ I want to live with integrity. And this is a step towards that. Sending LOVE always.

Hello old fans, new fans and passers by - I’m changing my name! And I’m changing my pronouns. From Kate to Kae. From she/her to they/them. I’ve been struggling to accept myself as I am for a long time. I have tried to be what I thought others wanted me to be so as not to risk rejection. This hiding from myself has led to all kinds of difficulties in my life. And this is a first step towards knowing and respecting myself better. I’ve loved Kate. But I am beginning a process and I hope you’ll come with me. From today - I will be publishing my books and releasing my music as Kae Tempest! It’s pronounced like the letter K. It’s an old English word that means jay bird. Jays are associated with communication, curiosity, adaptation to new situations and COURAGE which is the name of the game at the moment. It can also mean jackdaw which is the bird that symbolises death and rebirth. Ovid said the jackdaw brought the rain. Which I love. It has its roots in the Latin word for rejoice, be glad and take pleasure. And I hope to live more that way each day. Funny because I know this is much more of a big deal to me than it is to anyone else, but because of my role as artist, it is in some ways a public decision as well as being a private one. So, here is my announcement. Sending my love to you all and wishing you courage as you face whatever you must face today. This is a time of great reckoning. Privately, locally, globally. For me, the question is no longer ‘when will this change’ but ‘how far am I willing to go to meet the changes and bring them about in myself.’ I want to live with integrity. And this is a step towards that. Sending LOVE always

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The Guardian view on poetry in schools: don't let it go | Editorial

August 7, 2020, 9:38 am

≫ Next: 'A dangerous first step': Simon Armitage among poets to blast GCSE decision

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Finding meaning in verse can be a challenge for teenagers. But it is also a joy, and letting them drop it is the wrong move

“Had we but world enough, and time…” The opening line of Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress sums up the dilemma of the English exam regulator Ofqual, which this week decided the Covid-19 crisis means that next year GCSE English literature students will, if they wish, be able to drop poetry completely. Ofqual feels that, with no certainty of a full return to school in the autumn, it will be “extremely challenging” to teach a full syllabus. It worries that students would struggle “to get to grips with complex literary texts remotely”.

This is no doubt true, but Ofqual’s solution is perverse. Study of a Shakespeare play has been deemed sacrosanct – no doubt making Shakespeare optional would have caused a tempest. The other three time-honoured components – the 19th-century novel, post-1914 British fiction and drama, and poor old poetry – will be optional, with students having to pick two from three. Modern fiction and drama is likely to be a default choice for many, leaving a straight fight between Donne and Dickens.

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'A dangerous first step': Simon Armitage among poets to blast GCSE decision

August 7, 2020, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: Poem of the month: How to Do Absolutely Nothing by Barbara Kingsolver

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Poet laureate joins Michael Rosen and Imtiaz Dharker to criticise Ofqual announcement that poetry will be optional next year

Poet laureate Simon Armitage and former children’s laureate Michael Rosen are among the top UK poets decrying the government’s decision to make poetry optional for GCSE students next year, describing it as “a dangerous first step”.

Ofqual announced on Tuesday that, due to the impact of coronavirus on education, it would allow exam boards to change their assessment criteria for GCSE English literature next summer. While students will still be assessed on a Shakespeare play, they will only have to focus on two out of the three remaining areas – poetry, the 19th-century novel, and fiction or drama from the British Isles after 1914.

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Poem of the month: How to Do Absolutely Nothing by Barbara Kingsolver

August 8, 2020, 4:00 am

≫ Next: The best recent poetry – review roundup

≪ Previous: 'A dangerous first step': Simon Armitage among poets to blast GCSE decision

The best recent poetry – review roundup

Rent a house near the beach, or a cabin
but: Do not take your walking shoes.
Don’t take any clothes you’d wear
anyplace anyone would see you.
Don’t take your rechargeables.
Take Scrabble if you have to,
but not a dictionary and no
pencils for keeping score.
Don’t take a cookbook
or anything to cook.
A fishing pole, ok
but not the line,
hook, sinker,
leave it all.
Find out
what’s
left.

• How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) by Barbara Kingsolver is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The best recent poetry – review roundup

August 8, 2020, 4:00 am

≫ Next: Poetry saved me. Don’t deny it to next generation, pleads award-winner

≪ Previous: Poem of the month: How to Do Absolutely Nothing by Barbara Kingsolver

My Darling from the Lions by Rachel Long; Moving House by Theophilus Kwek; Road Trip by Marvin Thompson;After Fame by Sam Riviere

Poem of the month: How to Do Absolutely Nothing by Barbara Kingsolver

Rachel Long’s My Darling from the Lions (Picador, £10.99), nominated for the Forward first collection prize, is alive with a breathless energy. The founder of the Octavia Poetry Collective for Womxn of Colour, Long writes with keen wit and delight in rendering the world new; an estate is described as “built like Tetris”, afros become orbs, dolls become a means by which to write about identity with a refreshing verve. There is pain woven alongside the giddy sensuality and sharp precision too (“A diary / isn’t a diary till / you won’t show anyone”). She is especially good at making the unfamiliar feel perfectly right and natural: “And even though I was green / I was The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.” A book of “serious play”.

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Poetry saved me. Don’t deny it to next generation, pleads award-winner

August 8, 2020, 11:18 pm

≫ Next: Cummings’ phone and lockdown row | Brief letters

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Rhythm, humour and politics of verse give young people a voice, says poet. Making it optional at GCSE is a mistake

I was a bit of a troublemaker in secondary school. I got sent to “time out” for busying myself with trying to make my peers laugh. I got detention for skipping homework, and extra homework for skipping detention – basically any kind of soft rebellion you can think of, I gave it a go. Like many kids, I found formal education at times exhausting, uninspiring, and an interruption of more important things like who fancied whom.

Although I was in the top set for many subjects, there were only a few classes that I felt genuine curiosity for, one of them being English literature. There were fewer absolutes. It felt like one of the only spaces in education where what I thought seemed to matter.

The next Carol Ann Duffy or Benjamin Zephaniah may go undiscovered because of these reforms

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Cummings’ phone and lockdown row | Brief letters

August 9, 2020, 9:56 am

≫ Next: Derry theatre remembers lives lost to the Troubles and Covid-19

≪ Previous: Poetry saved me. Don’t deny it to next generation, pleads award-winner

Given the repeated denials by Dominic Cummings and the PM’s assurances over the evidence he has seen (Two stories, different witnesses. So where was Dominic Cummings on 19 April?, 7 August), I think it’s time to stop arguing and just accept that Cummings’ phone was indeed in London that day.
Ray Fisher
Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

• Kae Tempest has adopted the non-gendered pronouns they and them (Kate Tempest announces they are non-binary, changes name to Kae, 6 August). Kae may not be either male or female, but is not more than one person. For a more pleasing grammatical concinnity, it should be “they is”, not “they are”.
Neil Ferguson
Vaillac, France

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Derry theatre remembers lives lost to the Troubles and Covid-19

August 9, 2020, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: Poem of the week: The Ancestors by Jackie Wills

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A socially distanced audience will sit among objects recalling Northern Ireland’s prolonged conflict and the pandemic in a piece about mourning

In a verse dedicated to his aunt, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote of a “sunlit absence”. That striking image of loss has now directly inspired a theatre production that will pay tribute to those who died during the Troubles in Northern Ireland and during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Anything Can Happen 1972: Voices from the Heart of the Troubles is set to be staged at Derry Playhouse this autumn. The theatre usually seats 150 but social distancing means the vast majority of its red chairs will be left empty, with space for only 20 or so people. The Playhouse is inviting audiences to contribute significant objects or photographs that connect them to loved ones lost during the Troubles or the pandemic. These will be placed on the empty chairs around audience members and illuminated, creating a kind of spotlit absence. Kieran Griffiths, the director of the Playhouse, says this cross between installation and theatre production is also a way of “spotlighting our missing audiences and our theatre community in mourning”.

Anything Can Happen 1972: Voices from the Heart of the Troubles is part of the Peace IV Programme, funded by the EU, to support peace and reconciliation.

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Poem of the week: The Ancestors by Jackie Wills

August 10, 2020, 2:00 am

≫ Next: A walk on the Wilde side – archive, 13 August 1983

≪ Previous: Derry theatre remembers lives lost to the Troubles and Covid-19

Cheerful and anarchic, the forebears here are still intriguing and mysterious

The Ancestors

are having a summit –
they chase around the garden
disturbing hens.

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A walk on the Wilde side – archive, 13 August 1983

August 12, 2020, 9:30 pm

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13 August 1983: John Gray began to be displeased with being identified with the fictional Dorian when scandal began to surround Oscar Wilde

The strange case of a buddy of Oscar Wilde who was out of the closet and into the confessional before you could say “Dorian Gray” is uncovered – well, partly uncovered – in a new biography of a minor 1890s poet who might have become a major reprobate if he had not instead become a Roman Catholic priest.

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Padded comfort and poetical correctness | Brief letters

August 14, 2020, 7:50 am

≫ Next: Greed, cruelty, consumption: the world is changed yet its worst persists | Omar Sakr

≪ Previous: A walk on the Wilde side – archive, 13 August 1983

Covid blame game | Cicero | Camp beds | Rosen welcome | Oldham

Larry Elliott rightly states: “Boris Johnson and his ministers cannot be blamed for the arrival of a pandemic” (UK economy: a full recovery from the Covid slump will be slow, 12 August). Nor could Gordon Brown and his ministers be blamed for a global banking crash, yet I seem to remember David Cameron doing just that and winning an election on its back.
Ken Gambles
Knaresborough, North Yorkshire

• “Politicians are not born, they are excreted” (Letters, 12 August). Absolutely right, but Cicero’s words, not Ovid’s.
Alec Sandison
Ottery St Mary, Devon

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Greed, cruelty, consumption: the world is changed yet its worst persists | Omar Sakr

August 15, 2020, 1:00 pm

≫ Next: Andrew Marvell 'died of overdose after spurning Catholic malaria cure'

≪ Previous: Padded comfort and poetical correctness | Brief letters

I have no great hope we will use this chance to transform for the better – but this is an unconvincing darkness, and we do not have to stay in it

This is part of a series of essays by Australian writers responding to the challenges of 2020

In the pre-dawn hour, as the dark becomes less sure of itself, I get up to go to the hospital. It’s cold, and I have to fast before this surgery, so I take my Lexapro pill with a sip of water right away. I was diagnosed with cholesteatoma before the pandemic locked the world in its grip, and went on to the public waiting list. The ENT specialist told me it was a routine surgery, a cutting away of abnormal growth behind the ear canal; decades ago, people died from this, their own skin growing into their brains. There was some risk of deafness, or damage to a nerve that could paralyse half of my face, but he had never slipped yet.

I’m the kind of man who assumes such odds exist to spite me, so I was not reassured. My fiance, Hannah, drove us to St Vincent’s at 6am, and the roads were busy, maybe because the restrictions were set to ease the next day and people couldn’t wait, or maybe because capitalism is a death cult that will brook no surcease, people gotta eat or work to pay the landlords, and we passed the time by shaking our heads at everyone’s foolishness as a way of ignoring our own.

Let them all grind their bodies to the mill, for somewhere a bank balance must grow

I take comfort in performance in the absence of control

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Andrew Marvell 'died of overdose after spurning Catholic malaria cure'

August 16, 2020, 1:02 am

≫ Next: Jennifer Breen obituary

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Academic finds evidence that Puritan poet took opiate-based remedy that instead caused him a lethal seizure

He famously begged his mistress not to be “coy”, warning her: “The grave’s a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace.”

Now new evidence uncovered in a 350-year-old manuscript suggests that Andrew Marvell went to his own grave prematurely, after he accidentally overdosed on an opiate intended to treat his malaria.

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Jennifer Breen obituary

August 16, 2020, 3:06 am

≫ Next: 'Droughts, bushfires, and now Covid': Australia's regional arts communities hold on for dear life

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My friend Jennifer Breen, who has died aged 83, spent much of her professional life contributing to the women’s movement by designing courses in women’s literature and putting together volumes celebrating neglected women’s poetry and prose.

The daughter of two teachers, Leo Breen and his wife, Molly (nee Zeven), Jennifer was born near Melbourne in Australia, where, after schooling at St Columba’s College in the city, she gained a degree in humanities from the University of Melbourne.

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'Droughts, bushfires, and now Covid': Australia's regional arts communities hold on for dear life

August 16, 2020, 7:45 pm

≫ Next: Poem of the week: Akwaba by Kwame Dawes

≪ Previous: Jennifer Breen obituary

The pandemic has only compounded difficulties facing arts centres and festivals outside the capital cities

Wiradjuri artist Michael Lyons used to receive visitors by the hour at his rural New South Wales workshop.

“Ten caravans a day – for out here, that’s a lot,” says Lyons, who lives and works in Narrandera, population 3,746.

Personally, there was a lot of time spent in paddocks screaming up at the sky

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Poem of the week: Akwaba by Kwame Dawes

August 17, 2020, 3:00 am

≫ Next: As You Were by Elaine Feeney review – a poet's darkly comic fiction debut

≪ Previous: 'Droughts, bushfires, and now Covid': Australia's regional arts communities hold on for dear life

A father welcomes his wailing newborn child to the world and as her time begins he vows his love for ever

Akwaba
For Sena

i
Brown snow lines the roadways.
The still, grey city whispers

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As You Were by Elaine Feeney review – a poet's darkly comic fiction debut

August 18, 2020, 1:30 am

≫ Next: Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz review – intimate, electric and defiant

≪ Previous: Poem of the week: Akwaba by Kwame Dawes

This tragicomic tale of a thirtysomething mother with a terrible secret serves as a keen-eyed portrait of modern Ireland

Elaine Feeney has published three acclaimed collections of poetry before turning to novels, and her fiction debut, As You Were, is steeped in the rhythms and evocative language that mark her poems. Voices jostle with one another, Galway colloquialisms woven in with text speak and emojis, as a run-down hospital ward serves as a microcosm for contemporary Ireland.

The narrator, Sinéad Hynes, a mother of three in her late 30s, has been admitted after collapsing. It’s eight months since she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, but she has put off telling her husband (and sons): “I thought it was a dreadfully selfish thing to do to another person, fill him up with worry and uncertainty, to try and make him figure out death.” Instead, she obsessively Googles drugs and cures and outcomes alongside the mundane business of daily life.

As You Were by Elaine Feeney is published by Harvill Secker (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15

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Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz review – intimate, electric and defiant

August 18, 2020, 4:00 am

≫ Next: 'You'll have to die to get these texts': Ocean Vuong’s next manuscript to be unveiled in 2114

≪ Previous: As You Were by Elaine Feeney review – a poet's darkly comic fiction debut

The Mojave and Latinx poet, up for this year’s Forward prize, is on breathtaking form in this intellectually rigorous collection exploring love and identity

Natalie Diaz’s second poetry collection – up for this year’s Forward prize– opens with its title poem, in which past and present blur in an eternal conflict. “The war never ended and somehow begins again,” she declares. Diaz, a US-based poet and MacArthur “genius grant” winner, identifies as queer, Mojave, Latinx, and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian tribe. In the US, she is, as the minotaur in her poem I, Minotaur suggests, “citizen of what savages” her. To be savaged is to be brutalised by her nation, but also lurking beneath the verb is the savage, a slur for indigenous people.

Conveying clear ideas through crisp, dazzling images, Diaz’s poems typically unfold in long lines grouped into short stanzas. She instructs and inquires; she mourns and rhapsodises. And though she is at the centre of several “wars” – squaring off with institutional racism, her brother’s drug addiction and environmental destruction – she also devotes much of the collection to eros and “wag[ing] love”. She nimbly shifts between English, Spanish and Chuukwar Makav (Mojave language), using vocabulary rich with Greek myth and geology. She shuns the western idea of reality, explaining to the non-Mojave reader in her poem The First Water Is the Body that Aha Makav, “the true name of our people”, means “the river runs through the middle of our body, the same way it runs through the middle of our land”. If this sounds like magical realism, it’s only because “Americans prefer a magical Indian”. She challenges the reader not to see the river-as-body as metaphor, but instead to accept that the fate of the river is the fate of all people: “How can I translate – not in words but in belief – that a river is a body, as alive as you or I, that there can be no life without it?”

This is a breathtaking, groundbreaking book, an intellectually rigorous exploration of the postcolonial toll on land, love and people

Postcolonial Love Poem is published by Faber & Faber (£10.99). To order a copy for £9.56 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.

Emily Pérez is a Ledbury Poetry Critic, a mentoring programme launched by Sandeep Parmar and Sarah Howe with Ledbury poetry festival and the University of Liverpool to tackle the underrepresentation of BAME poets and reviewers in critical culture.

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'You'll have to die to get these texts': Ocean Vuong’s next manuscript to be unveiled in 2114

August 19, 2020, 1:53 am

≫ Next: Maaza Mengiste: 'Knausgård really doesn’t need me as a reader, I can move on'

≪ Previous: Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz review – intimate, electric and defiant

Vietnamese-American author and poet joins Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Karl Ove Knausgård to lock away work in Norway to be published in 94 years’ time

Ocean Vuong is to become the seventh author in the Future Library, an ongoing art project that sees contemporary writers pen works that will remain unread until 2114, when they will be opened and printed on 1,000 trees currently growing just outside Oslo.

The writer and poet, who was born in Saigon and now lives in Massachusetts, is the author of the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and the TS Eliot prize-winning poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds.

Maybe I'm being too grim but my main concern is will readers be there? Or will they be in a bunker?

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Maaza Mengiste: 'Knausgård really doesn’t need me as a reader, I can move on'

August 21, 2020, 2:00 am

≫ Next: ‘One spring morning my dad vanished’: the son of poet Heathcote Williams looks back

≪ Previous: 'You'll have to die to get these texts': Ocean Vuong’s next manuscript to be unveiled in 2114

The Booker nominated author on the influence of Homer, struggling with Moby-Dick and feeling changed by Ama Ata Aidoo

The book I am currently reading
I read a few books at once, and am working on strengthening my reading in Italian: Scholastique Mukasonga’s Igifu, translated by Jordan Stump. Paul Mendez’s Rainbow Milkand Helena Janeczek’s La ragazza con la Leica.

The book that changed my life
Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy blew open my conceptions of what a book could do and what subjects it could address. I felt seen and acknowledged as an immigrant, an African, a young woman navigating white culture. It had a profound and lasting effect on me: I was not alone.

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