On Putting Up The Ticket Price at Hammer & Tongue

You think it’s easy,
being this airy poet dude
and still going out to earn a living?
My usefulness, such as it is,
resides in twisting words into strings of sweetly wrapped
bricks of meaning
to smash the glass walls of the discourse we’re trapped in.

Kate Tempest book launch, The Old Vic 23rd August 2012

What a pleasure it was to sit in the Old Vic and watch ‘performance poetry’! Kate Tempest, who makes the words ‘cunt’ and ‘fucking’ an endeering verbal tic, lovely in the extreme and inspiring as always, except this time in the grandest of settings so that when she looked up to take our imaginations with her to see the moon and sun of her poem, the roof of the regency theatre was so far above her that she actually seemed the mystic high priestess of the movement calling on the power of astral bodies.