Helena Nelson reviews Divisible by Itself and One by Kae Tempest (Picador, 2023)
Although I should know better, I read the back jacket first. That’s where I discovered Kae Tempest is “our foremost truth-teller”. But this truth-telling business was probably manic blurb put together by a retirement-happy editor (“Satan converses in the language of publisher’s blurbs, and I speak as his amanuensis”, says Don Paterson in The Fall at Home, his newest book of aphorisms.) It’s not fair to blame the author, who said in the 2015 poem-sequence Hold Your Own, “Fame is the worst thing that could happen to your reputation”.
In any case, this author is a tempest in every sense, and I’m nearly old enough to be their grumpy grandmother. Don’t talk to me about truth, young person! When the subject of Kae (formerly Kate) Tempest comes up among poets in my age group, there’s often a silent tsk-tsk followed by eyes to the ceiling. It’s the eye-rolling that once accompanied any mention of performance poetry (although since Joelle Taylor won the Eliot, the times they are a-changin). Nevertheless, it did occur to me that I was the most inappropriate person you could find to review this book. It’s a bit like Louis Theroux meeting gangsta rappers on Weird Weekends. Well, maybe not quite that bad.
Not that bad, because I have done my homework, and it has changed me. The efficient overview from our own Bruno Cooke was a great place to start. Besides, I have some background. I was alive in the seventies when hip-hop began (though I ignored it). Also I learned a few things from Bart Simpson (“Rap is the poetry of the street”) and that was okay with me.
I’m not suggesting Divisible By Itself and One is hip-hop. Or even spoken word. It’s undeniably page-poetry as we know it. But how do you consider this book outside the context of its author’s other achievements? Kae Tempest is not just another poet. This is someone who gob-smacked the legendary Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour; someone who’s performed for Jools Holland; who’s chummy with Lauren Laverne; who’s been interviewed by Andrew Marr and Mariella Frostrup and James O’Brien. Someone who chats to John Wilson on Front Row; who has had two albums co-produced by Rick Rubin (and if you don’t know who he is, that’s because you’re just a poet). Kae Tempest has spent a whole hour in Simon Armitage’s shed and has had more than one music album shortlisted for the Mercury Award (the music equivalent of the Booker). In 2020, ‘People’s Faces’ (from The Book of Traps and Lessons) was a FaceBook advert (you may know the voice without knowing you know it). Tempest is a playwright commissioned by the RSC; a celebrity photographed for Vogue. Which other poet has starred in a BBC2 Arena documentary named after them? This is a top professional, a stage-craft expert. For ‘readership’ read ‘fanbase’. We’re talking about a stunning performer who fills huge venues and leaves them gagging for more. Kae Tempest is a brand.
This is a top professional, a stage-craft expert. For ‘readership’ read ‘fanbase’. We’re talking about a stunning performer who fills huge venues and leaves them gagging for more. Kae Tempest is a brand
So bear with me, you middle-aged eye-rollers, I’m working my way towards the poetry on the page. From the start, Tempest has pursued an interesting come-and-go between written words and that same text in performance. Brand New Ancients, published as a long-poem paperback in 2013, was reviewed in the Guardian as a “spoken word theatre show”. It won the Ted Hughes prize, the judges having listened to a recorded version with orchestral backing, though they no doubt saw the page version too. In a Picador website film clip, Tempest talks about the distinction between performance work and page work: “I am learning [ …] to look for the rhythm in a different place, to understand the musicality of language on the page as a different thing from the musicality of the language that you sing or speak.”
This suits me. I’ve always found the off-rhymes of rap too far off, the scramble of syllables stressful. But it’s different when things are performed live. Also I’m not the target listener, and there are always lyric snatches in the albums that strike me as exceptional. Sometimes it’s the choruses (“Is there anybody else awake? / Will it ever be day again?” in Let Them Eat Chaos). Or it’s fragments of description, like this, from ‘Holy Elixir’ in The Book of Traps and Lessons:
I came to under a domed roof
The light was cold and clear and fragmented
[…]
I saw a muscle of school girls performing
I saw the ticket woman massaging the small of her back
And a young gent, neat as a crease in his work clothes
And the light, light as breath on the dirty, old track
Even when the lyrics don’t engage my antiquated ear, they’re magic for their intended listener. No question. Because this is a person who has an electric connection with an audience. Who has that rare spark.
But there’s an irrational thing about what we call ‘poetry’, isn’t there? It’s crazy, and yet the word itself suggests the peak of lyrical achievement, even though most poetry is anything but. As Tom Leonard put it, “If you dribble past five defenders, it isn’t called sheer prose”. So you can be tried and tested in musical performance, you can be a top-drawer lyricist, novelist and dramatist, and still might not be deemed to have cut it in ‘poetry’. Did Leonard Cohen ever win a poetry prize?
It seems most genre-crossing artists (or their agents) have to make a choice where to centre the artistic identity. Cohen went for singer/songwriter over poet/novelist. Joni Mitchell’s more singer/songwriter than painter. Kae Tempest (novelist, essayist, playwright) may issue collections of page poetry, but it’s the latest LP that pays the mortgage. These albums are recorded (and toured) with Kwake Bass on drums, Dan Carey (also producer) on drums, and Clare Uchima on keyboard. Tempest self-confessedly feels most at home with musicians – a team player, no less. Hollie McNish performs alone on stage, like any jobbing poet; but for Kae Tempest, solo delivery is the exception. When they do words without the band, it’s not spoken word, it’s ‘a capella’. And though you’ll find Tempest as a headliner at big festivals like Glastonbury and Lowlands, you’ll search in vain at pure poetry gigs.
Kae Tempest (novelist, essayist, playwright) may issue collections of page poetry, but it’s the latest LP that pays the mortgage
However, the Picador label stamps Tempest as a page poet too. From the start, this writer was ‘spotted’ and subsequently developed by high-kudos poet/editor Don Paterson. Not everybody’s sixth collection is described as a “scoop” when the author hasn’t been short-listed for a poetry prize for a decade. Having said this, Divisible by Itself and One seems to have attracted less attention than expected. It’s easy to track down a handful of reviews for Tempest’s previous book. Googling this one produces only a single paragraph of Guardian round-up. But hang on. According to the sales copy, this is the author’s peak achievement so far. “Best to date”, they declare. If so, why wasn’t it short-listed for Forward or Eliot? It is on the long list for the Dylan Thomas Prize, but has anybody made a fuss about that? What’s going on? Could Kae Tempest have committed the well-known poetry sin of being popular? Have they – like John Hegley and Pam Ayres and John Cooper Clarke – been enjoyed by too many people? Because if this page-poetry book is really “their best yet”, shouldn’t people be paying more attention to it?
I’ll declare my hand at this point. Divisible by Itself and One, for me, is the best Tempest poetry-on-the-page so far. It’s engagingly short: only forty poems, though the last one is long and unlike the rest. More of that later. The first piece is strong and also striking. It’s a solid block of 21 lines, each capitalised, with line-lengths similar (9-11 syllables) but not metrically regular. The scene is painterly, a street at night where “houses lean in”. A van pulls up. A woman with a suitcase tumbles out. Her features are long “like a stretched mirror”. Suddenly she feels she’s “nothing but a sequence / Of events remembered differently by / Everyone involved.” It’s a neat way of putting it, and although the narration is third person, this feels personal to me. It’s also universal. Aren’t we all “a sequence of events”? But the highpoint comes when the reader sees what the woman can’t, namely the “queue of silhouettes” lined up behind her – her previous selves – mirroring all her actions. And when she cries out and “asks to be opened”, they cry out too “in solemn chorus”. It’s riveting, not least from a poet/playwright who knows about Sophoclean choruses. The shadowy selves both echo and confirm the woman’s need “to be opened”. And with that idea floated, the book itself opens. We read on.
It’s clear as you flick through the volume that ‘form’ is central: there are multiple shapes, sizes and approaches, including three or four ‘concrete’ pieces. This formal interest is natural to any poet. However, between this book and the last, the author came out as non-binary, and at Pride 2023 introduced themself as “a trans-masculine person”. The rapper’s voice has deepened; the preoccupation with previous selves has an achingly personal focus, and we might remember that the poet’s 2014 collection, Hold Your Own, centres on the character of Tiresias, the mythical male prophet, who spent seven years as a woman. (Artists turn to myths that connect with their own lives.)
It’s clear as you flick through the volume that ‘form’ is central: there are multiple shapes, sizes and approaches, including three or four ‘concrete’ pieces
The second poem, ‘Body’, is in terza rima. It doesn’t work as well as the opener but it has lovely moments, and again first-line capitalisation flags the formal tradition. The third piece, ‘Mountain road at midnight, Crete’, eases up a little. It’s in couplets, drops the studied capitals, lots of white space – but the couplets only thinly disguise an underlying common measure. It could just as well have been laid out in ballad quatrains. For me, it works beautifully. Read aloud and you can hear the metre:
Up to my chest in heavy night
the jasmine like a spell.
Our lives are hung on solid things;
the washing line, the well.
The broken door, the leaning tree,
the step, the tap, the brick;
a living flame that domes around
a disappearing wick.
No unnecessary description, lots of unadorned nouns – “the step, the tap, the brick” – plenty to think about, and easy on the ear. This is good work.
There are poems here I like far less (though this is true in any book). ‘Be careful that you don’t become a parody of yourself’ is a dense, unpunctuated prose piece that I find impossible to read with pleasure. I prefer ‘Getting On’ (terza rima again) which – despite the occasional inelegant line (such as “We forge ahead, sure we’ll disprove the map”) – has some perfect turning points:
Let poems be the windows, not the views.
The stupid part was thinking I could choose.
‘Amie’ strikes me as a love poem that tries too hard (we’ve all written them). ‘Give and Take’ goes in and out of terza rima, and is notably flawed: one line rhymes “afford it” with “chored it”. But there’s much of worth in this same piece – for example the halfway couplet (“You drink, you shout, you ache, you live. / As much as it is possible to give.”) and its neat echo in the concluding lines:
The rain, the pipes, the long nights spent awake.
As much as it is possible to take.
‘Fig’ is a sestina, and not, I think, a good one. How could it be a good idea to make the word ‘fig’ a line-end repeat? Alas, ‘love’ is another line-end; and pops up predictably as the final word. The road to sentimentality is paved with poems ending ‘love’.
Back to the book’s strengths because they outweigh my cavils
But back to the book’s strengths because they outweigh my cavils. There are several brief poems, likeable souls, often working with precision and without pretension – ‘Flood’, for example, and ‘Us’, and ‘The more you know the less you know’. ‘Choices’ is a relaxed sonnet, and it works. ‘Brother’ is a prose piece and for me strongly emotive, its prose rhythms working full belt. ‘Crush’ may not have a lot to say but it’s well done, its repetitions valid. And what about the curious ‘These things I know, Part II’? Only three words long, the body of the poem responds to its own title: “I know nothing”. And there is no part I in the book anyway. Part I (for those in the know) is actually in the 2014 book, Hold Your Own and it extends over four pages. So the brevity of Part II sends a clear message and marks a move away from assertion and toward uncertainty/possibility. ‘As useless a memory as any other’, for example, contains the lovely (and simple) lines: “and I have so much to learn // of what a person can and can’t bear”.
And then there’s the concluding piece – three and a half pages of long, rolling lines unlike anything else in the book. Titled ‘Love song for queens, studs, butches, daddies, fags and all the other angels’, it’s reminiscent of long-line Ginsberg (although not really) or Whitman (although not really). Perhaps this is the deeper voice, the changed rhythms of Kae (not Kate) Tempest. From the opening lines onwards, the poem is nakedly personal:
Ever felt wrong. Like so wrong, like please just cut my body off
and never look at me in fact don’t touch me. I like you it’s not
that.
It’s these hips this chest these things on me, they aren’t mine and
they make me flinch when you touch me. I don’t. It’s not that
I don’t like, but please you can’t understand.
I want to kill it. All these parts. And the things that I can’t be are
bad they are a wound and I can’t. But what she heard was none
of this just silence.
This was hard to write. The halting rhythms, the stripped punctuation, the hesitantly conversational diction – all this has developed organically out of whatever the poem needed to be. It seems to me a huge risk for its author who – despite stage charisma – is a naturally reticent person, like many actors. But here on the paper (forget about that truth-telling nonsense) the poet is honest and vulnerable. Can you be too honest? Perhaps there’s a kind of frankness that makes some readers uncomfortable. This is a love song for “beautiful trans people, natural as life”. Could some readers feel uneasy with that? I can only say, I didn’t. The poem is about the wretchedness of alienation and self-hatred, and the relief of finally coming home to one’s tribe. Anyone who has ever felt alienated (e.g. most of us) could relate to that.
[ … ] it’s not the same voice that half-speaks, half-chants on the albums. It’s private and it’s personal and it’s honest. It has humility. I can make it mine
Kae Tempest is often described as a ‘spoken word poet’, and this last poem employs many rhetorical techniques. There’s no hard division between page-poetry and performance, of course, although this poet doesn’t ‘tour’ their page stuff. But there is poetry that only properly works when the poet’s there to deliver it, poetry that only comes alive in the ‘audio’ version. This concluding ‘Love song’ is not that. This whole book is not that. The voice, whatever it is, is transferable. I can hear it in my head and it’s not the same voice that half-speaks, half-chants on the albums. It’s private and it’s personal and it’s honest. It has humility. I can make it mine. This human being, a phenomenal performer, has stepped quietly off the stage and into a book. The best poems here say precisely what they need to say, what the author was born to say. Attention should be paid.
Helena Nelson is a poet, critic, and publisher, founding editor of HappenStance Press and Sphinx Review, and Consulting Editor at The Friday Poem. Her first collection, Starlight on Water (Rialto, 2003), was a Jerwood / Aldeburgh First Collection winner. Her second was Plot and Counterplot (Shoestring, 2010). She also writes and publishes light verse, including Down With Poetry! (HappenStance, 2016) and Branded (Red Squirrel, 2019). Her most recent collection is PEARLS: The Complete Mr & Mrs Philpott Poems (HappenStance, 2022).
