Brand New Ancients

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Unfortunately I just don't care. I didn't want to read a story/poem about the intertwining fates of people trying to people and people trying to be monsters. But then to have that put in my face with an ancient Greek mask on it? Maybe you can see my point now.

Since receiving the 2013 Ted Hughes Award for Brand New Ancients, Kate Tempest’s been busy, securing a Mercury Music Award nomination for the energetic, socially engaged hip-hop album, Everybody Down and publishing Hold Your Own, a reworking of the Tiresias myth. With its cross-over appeal, her performance poetry has found new audiences and has been selling out music venues. In the old days / the myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves. / But how can we explain the way we hate ourselves, / the things we’ve made ourselves into, / the way we break ourselves in two, / the way we overcomplicate ourselves?” (Tempest 1). What Tempest is trying to say here is that although we are gods and we are in control, the reality of it is that we are not completely in control and that knowing that fact leads to irritation. People are just trying to live their lives yet they can’t even fully control. They try to deal with themselves like a god, with their own problems and such, they forget that they are not separate with the rest of the world and their problems. And then they end up breaking ourselves by focusing on their problems instead of themselves. The people are the “brand new ancients” and yet they are not, they are also just the today people, the useless, pathetic, heroic, stressed, stupid people of today. With understanding what Tempest wanted to show with her poem, finding how she expands the topic is simpler and easier to …show more content…

Work cited

The conclusion seems to fit the themes of the narrative: the possibility to dip into a plethora of individual stories. Moving to years later, in the skin-crawlingly awful voice of Clive’s father, an alcoholic, abusive man now emigrated to Thailand (“out here, pension is riches”) where he’s surrounded by “men like [him]”, left wondering about what had happened to the central characters, we are distant once more to these ‘gods’, and encouraged to find our own.

Queer and feminist are common terms are terms that are commonly used to refer to gender differences. For instance, individuals would relate “queer” to homosexual. In the current situation, people use the term to refer to the individuals whose body connotations does not comply with the societal expectations and thus it can be concluded that queer explores the difference the gender identity with reference to the feminism. The section of the paper looks at how feminism, gender, and queer theories have contributed to the oppression of the specific individual groups. Tempest’s work as a rapper is clear, and I think Brand New Ancients works best read aloud to really appreciate the work that has gone into crafting this poem. It tells the story of normal people the reader could easily identify with, their stories contrasted against the idea that they have the importance of Gods and are more than the roles they’ve been given by society. It fits in well with the rest of her poetry in her other collections like Hold Your Own, where she covers contemporary topics that many people wouldn’t typically associate with poetry and finding references to mythology in everyday situations. I had heard about this and loved other such Ancient-Modern fusion stuff like some of Gaiman's works or Alice Oswald's Memorial or Atwood's the Penelopiad or Anders Nilsen's Rage of Poseidon, etc.Kae Tempest was the winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2012 with Brand New Ancients. They started out when they were 16, rapping at strangers on night buses and pestering MCs to let them on the mic at raves. Their theatre writing credits include Wasted for Paines Plough, Brand New Ancients for the BAC, and Glasshouse for Cardboard Citizens. They have written poetry for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Barnado’s, Channel 4 and the BBC, and worked with Amnesty International to help secondary school children write their own protest songs.