Greek Myths & the Art of Words

Kate Tempest: A 21st Century London Poet – Musing and Rapping on Greek myths

04 April 2015     by James C. Stratis

We can be inspired by words, the art of words as in the inspirational art of poetry. Previously¹ we connected to the ancient place of Kommos when we posted an article, a blog, on the poetry of place, through a poem by Constantine Cavafy.

If the archaeological site of Kommos on Crete is to receive the stewardship and attention it deserves, its story must continue to be told and not just to the intellectual specialist. One can read interpretation about a subject like a person, place or thing for only so long, before the cloud of boredom descends and the fresh air of the new, the light of the next… pulls us onwards.

Finding another way to connect the public to a story, such as through puppetry, animation, humor and/or music is something we wrote about before². Kate Tempest, an award winning young poet from London England, likewise, connects her audience to stories artfully. She has put her own spin on timeless Greek stories, some of them like Icarus located off the waters of Crete, where our story of Kommos is anchored.

Here below we include a continuation on the subject of the poetic delivery of a story shared by three New York Times journalists; Charles Isherwood, Rachel Donadio, and Michiko Kakutani. They write in part about the means and values of storytelling.

“The roots of theater lie in oral storytelling, and Ms. Tempest’s huge ambition is to reanimate this tradition — or at least keep it chugging along for a little while longer. In her hypnotically persuasive vision, the same passions and poisons that made Olympus such a lively place still simmer in the hearts of men and women trudging through their drab lives in cities the world over.”Donadio observes³

Charles Isherwood says “Ms. Tempest mostly speaks but occasionally sings out her tale in long, spiraling phrases, rich in inspired images, although the language is vernacular (and the rhymes are often approximate). While she moves casually across the stage, she often seems to be vibrating like a tuning fork with the urgency of the telling, her arms sawing at the air in time with the propulsive rhythms of her speech, which also reflects hip-hop and rap influences.”⁴

One of Ms. Tempest poems stems from the fact that there were Bronze Age Minoan colonies on what is now the Italian island of Sicily. After the Bronze age, families from Crete continued to thrive there and the ancient Greek poet Diodorus “of Sicily” wrote in his Library of History [4.77.8} of Icarus and his father Daedalus and their inventive yet fatal escape from King Minos’ island Crete.⁵ The myth of Icarus is a lesson of thoughtless hubris, I do because I can, the timeless moral of the story being – listen to your (wiser) elders, steady on and you may get there.

This YouTube video was filmed in the poet’s house – November 2010, where Tempest performed Icarus before undergoing throat surgery.

Icarus

Soaring the skies that had always been beyond his reach
He felt like a champion
His feet kicked the clouds
His arms are bound in the feathers of his father’s labour
Which a little while later would be ashes … vapour.

Cumbersome limbs furnished with powerful things
He heard the wind speak
Every time he heard his wings beat
His Father flew before him and so the course was set
He said, Don’t fly by the waves ’cause your wings will get wet
but don’t fly so high that the sun melts the wax
He said stay on my path, son, Follow my tracks
But Icarus, enamored by the feeling of flight
He just had to fly higher and get closer to the light
The sun was hot against him as he carried on ascending
He felt strength in him increasing like the heat that was so tempting
Beneath was the world he left behind in search of better things
but to achieve that freedom he sacrificed everything.

I told him
Icarus
Come down from the sky you’re flying too high
Icarus
Heed your Father’s words this ain’t your territory
No one even noticed as he splashed and hit the sea bed
I wonder what he saw before he fell
And if he needed my help
Would he asked for it?
Probably, he wouldn’t
Probably, he thought he was invincible
He weren’t
In principle he burned
He smoldered in those myths
So that we who never flew before could learn from what he did.

See
Given the gift of flight
It was too easy to ignore
The warnings of his Father
How could he be truly responsible
When really all he wants to do was soar above his station and become the Sun’s equal
But the Sun can have no equal
Poor Icarus
That flicker in his eye
That distant picture in the sky
About to catch the light he sought
Ah, foolish young pride
Silly man-cub
How can you learn to fly if you haven’t even learned to stand-up
If he had listened to his father
Well then he would never would’ve drowned
But the happiness he felt is one he never would have found

Gifts are dangerous when they are given and not earned
A lesson merely heard, well that’s never a lesson learned
By the time his father turned, the wax had completely burned
Feathers scattered on the waves
And they just rolled on unconcerned
But for the small moment before he fell in to the sea
Icarus the head-strong had been completely free

Icarus
Come down from the sky,
You’re flying too high
Icarus
Heed your Father’s words, this ain’t your territory
No one even noticed as he splashed and hit the sea bed
I wonder what he saw before he fell
And if he needed my help
Would he asked for it?
Probably, he wouldn’t
Probably, he thought he was invincible
He weren’t
In principle he burned
He smoldered in those myths
So that we who never flew before could learn from what he did.

“Her spoken-word performances have the meter and craft of traditional poetry, the kinetic agitation of hip-hop and the intimacy of a whispered heart-to-heart, drawing on ancient mythology and sermonic cadence to tell stories of the everyday.”⁶

“It’s almost disorienting to realize that this intensely vivid tale (Brand New Ancients), which touches the deep chords of pity we associate with Greek tragedy, has been created by the petite, girlish young woman onstage, in jeans and sneakers. She is indeed someone you might just walk by on the street, perhaps noting her English-rose loveliness and her ingratiating smile, but little suspecting the mighty passions firing her imagination.” writes Donadio³

we’re the same beings that began, still living
in all of our fury and foulness and friction,
everyday odysseys, dreams and decisions …(Brand New Ancients)

Similar to the current financial disparity of today’s Greek citizens within the European Union, Donadio also says “An insistence on connection and revealing quiet moments of beauty in the lives of Londoners — many of them struggling to stay afloat in economic uncertainty — is at the heart of Ms. Tempest’s work. Citing both the poet William Blake and the rapper RZA among her influences, she is a powerful mix of innocence and experience with a growing, and fervent, following. Her play ‘Brand New Ancients’ reimagines the Greek gods as ordinary Londoners through the tales of two interconnected families.” and “She uses myth to frame contemporary personal stories.”³
Isherwood called it “a story so vivid it’s as if you had a state-of-the-art Blu-ray player stuffed into your brain.” He notes that ”With Ms. Tempest’s words painting the pictures, it’s pretty easy to focus.”⁴
Journalist Kakutani writes of the “29-year-old Kate Tempest’s gift for shattering — and transcending — convention and conventional genres, and says that “they also underscore the tensions and contradictions that fuel her dynamic art. Tiresias, the blind seer in Greek mythology who lived as a man and a woman, is the presiding figure in her (Tempest’s) collection ‘Hold Your Own,’ and the contemporary characters in her dazzling story-poem ‘Brand New Ancients’ are also conflicted beings in search of a self. They are torn between confidence and self-loathing, between aching loneliness and the tumult of love, between ambition and a revulsion for the phony accouterments of fame. Ms. Tempest describes these ordinary people as gods, and their quarrels — so reminiscent of the squabbling among the Greek gods on Mount Olympus — are both petty and profound. Myths used to be ‘the stories we used to explain ourselves,’ she (Tempest) observes, and to her, myths, like art, are a way to universalize individual dreams and suffering: They lend continuity and weight to the everyday struggles of life — ‘deadlines, debts, divorces’ — and remind us that every person, every passer-by on the street, has an ‘epic narrative’ within.”⁶

Times writer Donadio reports “And her fans believe the appeal will carry across the Atlantic. While Rachel Mannheimer, who acquired the new poetry collection for Bloomsbury, explained by email.³ ‘Her vision is about finding the universal in the local, the mythic in every individual — how we’re all part of something bigger and older than ourselves.’

We are in the age of leveraged value and multi-tasking. There are many paths to choose, leading us away from boredom. We ride on a bus with an earbud in place, we sit across from friends and our attention is redirected to our smart phones. Mass exposure to the MTV like videos with their rapid fire – quick video editing and the non-stop sight and sound action of the movie industry over the last thirty years has been fully integrated into commercial advertising for global capitalism.

We are expecting to have our attention held or we change the channel – change the delivery system.
The messages of the ancients, however, still resonate and must still be taught afresh. Combining poetry, music, live performance and an inspirational place such as Kommos the Minoan seaport and Greek temple site, has the potential to provide a sensory experience greater than the sum of the parts. We must encourage the multi-sensory experience of the feel of the sun, the wind, the sea, where the smell of the air and the presence of the spirit of Icarus’ past, frees the imaginations of visitors of all ages.

Kate Tempest’s ghostly familiar fatal lesson delivered through her lyric poem and performance, transports us to a place with learning from millennia ago, which is still relevant today. There, a better understanding that can be achieved by recalling lyric poetry, even more so within a full immersion environment like Kommos. Performance art like rap and poetry / rap poetry out of the in-door stage, amidst the sound and feel of the wind, the weather and cadent wave backdrop of the abandoned ancient seaport, can compound the visitor learning experience because the leveraged values of history, place, archaeology, and culture count and matter as much as ever in our recreation choices and in the funded curricula of formal institutions of learning.

1. Poetry and Place — Ιθάκη / Ithaka – C.P.Cavafy September 30,2014

2. Contemporary Music and Minoan Mythology December 06,2010

3. Rachel Donadio; NYTimes March 6, 2015

4. Charles Isherwood; NYTimes January 14, 2014

5. Diodorus of Sicily; ca 65-30BC

6. Michiko Kakutani; NYTimes  March 18, 2015

Featured Image triptych photocredits

      Clouds – Handa Gote group

       Kate Tempest –  Andrew Testa for The New York Times

       Burning Wing – zsazsabellagio.com

You can follow us on Twitter (@KommosAP) or join us on Facebook (Kommos Conservancy).

“Μπορείτε να μας ακολουθήσετε στο Twitter (@KommosAP) ή στο Facebook (Kommos Conservancy).”