Tag Archives: erik kennedy

Poetry Shelf celebrates Broken River Train / Dreams of Travel at the National Library

1 Reply

Installation shot, Peter Ireland

For the past four years I have been addicted to travel as my ventures into the physical world have been restricted to blood labs and the hospital. I travel every day within and beyond the pathways and tow ropes of a poem, within the joy and nourishment of a secret books I am writing, within the writings and conversations and posts I create and poets contribute to Poetry Shelf. I travel into the past, especially to my long term scholarly relationship with Italy and the incredible experiences I have had there, to New York, London, Scotland, Ireland, Portugal, France, Barcelona, Japan to name a few, and all over Aotearoa with my partner Michael and our girls (as both children and adults).

Travel is a way of widening how we approach beauty, human endeavours, art, music, theatre, literature, sport, physical challenges, cultural relationships, racism, sexism, how we create and dismantle hierarchies, how we feed ourselves and our families, how we can communicate in different languages. How we see things in astonishing lights.

Travel is also a way of widening the markers of home. Of finding and holding beauty, of holding epiphanies close to our hearts, of listening to the stories of the person standing next to us, of taking time out from daily routines to savour and reboot within the rhythms of travel whether by train or bus or car or bicycles, or in hiking books or walking shoes.

Peter Ireland has created a mesmerising exhibition at the National Library, entitled Broken River Train | Dreams of Travel. To celebrate, and with the help of Peter and a group of poets, I offer you a poetry and image travel feast.

Peter has written an introduction to the exhibition and we have included seven photographs, along with a link to the collection of William Williams, one of the photographers.

I went travelling through my poetry shelves to select a dozen poems that offer myriad travel connections.

To travel is to dream. To dream is to travel. To dream and to travel is to connect and to reboot.

Paula Green

H. A. F. Jackson, J. Alexander, and A. G. Jackson with penny-farthing cycles. The three men travelled from Christchurch to the West Coast on the bicycles in January 1887. Photographer unidentified. ATL: PA1-f-010-21

I don’t know exactly why this exhibition came to the fore and into the programme, though to spend time looking at the collections of the Turnbull Library is to travel and to roam. And as someone for whom dreams are almost always about travel, then a sense of why this exhibition begins to emerge. The exhibition originally had the title of Road Trip …  and the wonderful image above was the first added to a file of about 350 images, of which 51 appear in the exhibition. Curiously, and somewhat to my regret, the Penny Farthing cyclists didn’t make the final cut though it’s an image I remain very fond of.

Along the way I came across a Steffano Webb image of Christchurch Railway Station showing a sign for ‘Broken River Train.’ This felt like just the right title.

Central to the exhibition is a selection from the more than 1000 holiday pictures taken by William Williams during the leisurely trip to Europe he made with his wife Lydia between 1925 and 1927. Evocative, dreamlike images of ‘foreign places,’ timeless, austere, sparsely populated stage sets of history, pre-tourist boom and ripe for William Willam’s deliberate and tender record.

A hundred years on these images speak to the opening lines of L. P. Hartley’s novel, ‘The Go-Between,’ that ‘the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.’ Whilst true in one sense, I suggest that we are more than passive onlookers at a remote world, we respond to the pathos and beauty of the images, that in looking at the past we rearticulate it, make it fresh and meaningful, dream it anew.

Other photographers provide key imagery for our dreams of travel, including Leo White, official war photographers Thomas Frederick Scales and George Kaye and the American adventurer Melvin Vaniman. Max Oettli, John Pascoe and Edgar Williams are also among the abiding spirits.

My hope for the exhibition is that visitors will find it evocative and that they take away a favourite image in their mind together with an appetite for exploring the collections for themselves.

Peter Ireland

Installation shot, Peter Ireland

Seven Photographs

Christchurch Railway Station, c. 1906
Photographer Steffano Webb
ATL: 1/2-040999-G

The platform sign for Broken River Train provides a helpful clue for dating this image. The Broken River train serviced a temporary railway terminus on the midland railway line, completed in time to allow travel to the Christchurch exhibition in 1906 – 1907. Thirty-six years in the making, the midland line was finally completed in 1923 with the opening of the 8.5km Ōtira tunnel.

Ice skating in the Otago region, c. 1935
Photographer: Leo White
ATL: WA-25279-F

Street vendor, Barcelona, Spain, c.1926
Photographer: William Williams
ATL: 1/4-100043-F

William Williams (1858 – 1949) was born in Cardiff and emigrated to New Zealand with his family about 1881. He lived in Wellington for a time, recording his experience of life in a bachelor’s flat, the ‘Old Shebang,’ on upper Cuba Street. In 1887 he married Lydia Devereux, the couple living first in Napier, then moving to Dunedin and to an address on Royal Terrace, Kew.

There are a 1000 images recording the leisurely European holiday the Williams took between 1925 and 1927. This selection forms a centrepiece of the intended dreamscape of the exhibition. You can check out the collection here: https://natlib.govt.nz/items?text=William+Williams+1925-1927+Europe&commit=Search

M. Vertelli crossing the Whanganui River on a tightrope, 31 October 1867
Photographer: William Harding
ATL: 1/1-000253-G

M. Vertelli, dubbed the ‘Australasian Blondin,’ caused quite a stir on his tour of New Zealand as these two reports suggest:

‘On Saturday next at 3 o’clock M Vertelli will astound the admiring multitude by accomplishing the most daring act recorded in ancient or modern times, and, regardless of danger, unconscious of fear, he will, by, as it were, a magic chain, connect Campbelltown and Wanganui by bridging the noble river, (900 feet across!) the vast expanse of waters flowing beneath.’

Source: Wanganui Herald, Volume I, Issue 124, 24 October 1867, page 3

Cyclists Pat Driscoll and Bill Mulrooney near the road bridge in Alexandra, c. 1901
Photographer: J.H. Ingley
ATL: MNZ-1740-1/2-F

Bernini Fountain, Rome, Italy, c.1926
Photographer: William Williams
ATL: 1/4-100248-F

Taxi driver’s dinner, Westwind coffee bar, Queen Street, Auckland, 1968
Photographer: Max Oettli
ATL: PADL-000106

a dozen poems

The Armchair Traveller

Excuse me if I laugh.
The roads are dark and large books block our path.
The air we breathe is made of evening air.
The world is longer than the road that brings us here.

The necklace is a carving, not a kiss.
You run towards the one you can’t resist.
At first she edges backwards, then she stalls.
Now every sentence needs another clause.

The road goes off through willows, then it winds.
Is that the famous temple over there?
Why are the people round about so undefined?
Why must they kiss then disappear?

Time now to let the story take its course,
just settle back and let the driver drive.
Bliss is it late at night to be alive,
learning to yield, and not to strive.

Bill Manhire
from Wow, VUP, 2020

xxv. No Response

Noman under a sheep who’s calling?

Why am I calling sheep farmers? Don’t they hear
the call of Cassino? Don’t they know you can see
the whole damned world from the top of Montecassino!
The whole wide world if you stretch your arms out
and fall off the edge and sail like a paratrooper?

Didn’t they remember the names here?

My mind leaves the walls of the abbey and sits
in the train station chapel with the smell
of cigarettes outside.

Robert Sullivan
from Cassino: City of Martyrs / Città Martire, Huia, 2010

In Dublin        
for my father, need it be said

I’ll go to Ireland some day, see those places
you’ve told me about, now that is a promise.
Not before I die, don’t leave me alone, my father
said, contrary as ever, all that bullshit and teardust
I knew so well, and that is how I let the years
slide steadily and quietly away beyond
his last defeated breath. But the day had to come

and I wish there was some way I could tell you
how much I love the broad River Liffey that runs
through the town and the way I’m enchanted
by St Stephen’s the sunlit park in the heart
of the city and the magnificent Corinthian
portico on the Four Courts, and yes the new Spire
of Dublin which of course you wouldn’t have seen
a whip of metal one hundred and twenty metres
high in the sky and the way they joke about the ‘stiffy
by the Liffey’ with that raw sly affection

but really it’s here in this music store in Dublin
these swift easy Irish tears of mine begin falling
between the CD spines lay me down / between
the bars / everybody / I’ll see your heart and I’ll raise
you mine / stay with me till dawn / volcano / no ordinary
love / nothing can
          nothing can
and I remember that you could sing
a sweet tenor all your own

So, yes, here I am, I’ve made it, right to the centre
of it all, it’s a grand street is O’Connell Street
complete with bullet holes and all. I’m watching men
walk past their hard faces taut with strain and the women
with their difficult mouths. I feel perfectly at home,
thank you for asking.

Fiona Kidman
from Where Your Left Hand Rests, Random House, 2010

Tour Bus Minutiae and Commentary:
West Berlin, 1985

I have felt the bite & crunch of winter winds, the sudden
stir of snow hunched around the corner waiting to pounce
on you, I’m envigoured by it. It’s called: Berliner Luft:
Duft, Duft, dufte! Loverly.

Dog-lovers walk their pets home, anxious to complete
the chore quickly, a marvel of detachment & poise as the dog
pisses or shits. When new snow lies white on the ground,
the nature-mess that dogs make is easier to see and avoid.

There are over a hundred thousand dogs registered
in Berlin. The City Authorities are sympathetic.
Two hundred and fifty thousand trees have been planted.

Despite the generosity of statistics, there are canine
territorial disputes over the third tree. Tribal Elders
from my Dog Tribe—Ngati Kuri—will send a mediator
to Geneva, me. It’s not a piddly matter.

Every tree has been given a number which I find phantastisch!
You may rendezvous with the beautiful Dame from East Berlin
unter den Linden tree Nummer 2231 Eisenberger Strasse.
On the Wannsee border-bridge, a Spy Exchange Service—
Spionageastauschdienst—is in place.

Dead leaves, which carpet drain and pathway, are cleared away
by City Council workers who come from Italy and Türkei.
Five tons of dog-dung is collected every day.

Bottled bio-gas from such a rich source is exported.
Gas ovens at Dachau & Auschwitz have been made redundant.
A taped recording of mixed doggy-barks is enclosed with each
bottle. I’m not impressed . . . Doggy-bark recording is a dubious
practice.

On the Lietszensee Ufer the trees are stark and still. A ridge
of snow rests along the tops of their nobbly, snaky branches,
their dark winter bareness, fattened and enhanced. On the frozen
lake, voices go up in steam—to the hiss of skates, sluicing . . .

Inside the warm pub on Nachod Strasse a dog comes in wagging
its owner, Sabine, on the end of a leash. Sabine orders a coffee,
unwinds her scarf. The dog sits down by her feet. Helmut, A Berliner,
greets her with tongue-in-cheek: ‘Sabine, kommen Sie hier bei Fuss?’

Dear Brown Bear City, I love you. Ach ja! You’re s bloody wonder-
ful ache.

Hone Tuwhare
from Short Back & Sideways, Godwit, 1992

Ode to the little hotel

Little Hotel
we love you
and in your little
rooftop room we love
each other, even though
we are big
and hardly worthy of such
a little bed.

•

We love the street
you stand on
which is neither long
nor short, but somewhere
in between. And we love
your neighbours
who are our friends—
smaller than us
and so ideally suited
to their address.

•

O Little Hotel we love
your breakfast room
your petit déjeuner
the crypt we reach by
steep narrow stairs
a bob and a curtsy on the last
to miss the bottom
beam—we love
all this.

•

You are our first
and last of Paris, Little
Hotel. We love
your lightning and the
|rinsing rain, the way
your white towels sound
the slap of surf
outside our room.

•

You are the rabbit
of Paris. The duck
with beans and peas.
Little Hotel you are
our herb and cheese,
our soup and sauce,
you are all of these.

•

O Little Hotel
we love your lift
in which we are
always pleased
to know each
other, pressed so close
as we are.
And when we take them
we love your stairs—
wide enough for one
winding up to light.

•

Little Hotel
your windows through which
we duck and climb
to stand on your roof
and look out over
other roofs, we hold these
dear to us.

•

You are paint and wood
and stone and all things made
from the these. Little Hotel
you are a gallery
of leaves.

•

You are our pink suit
of Paris, Little Hotel, our men
in shorts, our jazz band.
Later we will slap our knees
and remember you as four musicians
outside the Sorbonne.

•

O Little Hotel
in whose room
we read and
rest a little
after long days
we revere you.

•

O Little Hotel
we will never
forget you. We will write
and we will return.
O Little Hotel
doorway to our city
of Paris
au revoir.

Jenny Bornholdt
from Summer, VUP, 2003. It was originally published as a limited edition accordion book (or leporello) hand printed by Brendan O’Brien, with drawings by Greg O’Brien.

The laboratory of time passing

The angle of the sun tells us
who we are

or might be. And what time passes
as it passes. How

each afternoon is soothed into
place – the newest tile

in the old town’s expansive roof – and
the ticking of

the unofficial parish clock: its most
senior citizen, his walking stick

ascending the high stone path,
bicycle bell

and water bottle clinging
to its shaft.

Saorge, 13 June 2002

Gregory O’Brien
from afternoon of an evening train, VUP, 2005

Getting to know you, Venice

Pigeons in Venice are born mathematicians. Under their wings,
the flash of fob watch and compass with metal points sharpened.
Kohl-eyed from nights spent marking and route-mapping,
they leave their ledges in the morning, the distance between
dome, cornice and cobbled square plotted for ease

of business. The city’s theirs—a lavish 3D drawing
of scrubbed stone and stolen-gold mosaics, an almost-place
defined by saints and lines, angles and lions and, of course,
the pigeons’ squawk. Raucous at ground level, they are silent
in flight, daring to keep the company of angels, careful

not to graze the pinnacles of temples. Down a side street, away
from the crowds, a gondolier monitors his comrades’ movements
via cell phone. The smells of garlic, myrrh and dead fish mix.
And above it all, the quiet, white whirr of pigeons’ wings.
I believe it might be possible to attempt the impossible

here—wear feathers? Dissolve solid marble
on the tongue? In this city, where rain falls from frescoes
and children fence their shadows in courtyards at dusk,
even the gutters and drainpipes
and dirt bins shimmer.

Claire Beynon
from Open Book: Poems and Images, Steele Roberts, 2007

Spare Change

New to London, maybe I gave off the scent Naïve
to the ragged man who shuffled

along the tube train aisle
where I stood gripping the pole

amid the massed bodies of rush-hour crush;
each face, it seemed, averted in disgust.

Like the small-town citizen I really was
when the man said, ‘Can you help me, love?’

I met his gaze then looked down
to see what he wanted to show me:

his forearm split open, swollen,
infection swarming like red wasps.

‘I need some change to get to hospital.
Spare a couple of quid?’

I didn’t know local custom. How to draw a blank
down over the mind, or how to give a pound

as indifferently as if our hands held slots for cash.
Instead I cried out, ‘What happened to you? Oh my God.’

He stalled, his stare a flame held too close,
then rolled down shirt and jacket sleeves.

‘Never mind.’ He pushed through the throng
as our train hurtled to the next stop.

A second stranger tapped my shoulder.
‘Forget him. He’s a con artist.’

But the fire-swarmed gash.
The pomegranate gasp of it.

The man shrugged. ‘Doesn’t let it heal.
I’ve seen him. Uses pocket knives, tin lids.

‘Grifter. Scabber. Shows wounds for sympathy.
Don’t encourage him with money.’

One man so strung out he’d self-harm for cash.
Another so jaded he’d cauterised compassion.

Decades on, the memory opens
and reopens in the same raw place.

As if I could heal anything
as pernicious as indifference

I am at it again with the sutures and saline
of these ink-black glyphs

needle and stitch
needle and stitch.

Emma Neale
from Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2024

Remembering America

The question ‘Do you miss it?’ is unanswerable.
It’s obscene to say yes. It’s depressing to others to say no.
It’s inauthentic and invertebrate to say maybe.
I’d rather sing ‘Oh baby, oh baby, oh baby’ in a song
than answer it. I have attempted just to name things
I have liked in my location-limited experience,
like fried clams as big as men’s watch-faces
or a turkey jumping majestically over my father’s bicycle wheel
or suburban snowmen bathing in the cold light of flat-screen TVs,
but that doesn’t answer the question ‘Do you miss it?’
any more than ‘I believe I was a cat in a past life’
answers the question ‘How do you feel?’
Prove to me that the country I thought I grew up in
was real. You can’t unless you beguile me
with your fireworky thinking, your monster-truck cunning,
your whispers of calumny that you cast like the peal of a cracked bell
across the prairies I’ve never been to
and the peninsulas I have been to
and the places I’ve been to and forgotten everywhere.
Missing something is a state of mind,
says the polar bear on her shrinking ice floe.
Knowing not to miss it is a state of grace,
says the hermit crab in her rented carapace.
America, like a lot of people, I’m keeping my distance,
as we do from a super-volcano on public land.
America, a house haunted by itself cannot stand.
America, you are a monument to monumental misrepresentation,
and all your monuments should commemorate this.
America, you’re apostrophised so much
because you’re still not listening.
America, you look even worse from somewhere else
than you do from inside yourself.

Erik Kennedy
from There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime, VUP, 2018

The Catskill Mountains

There is a world of things that bees can see
which we cannot. They sense the earth’s
magnetic field, the electricity
driven by the molten core.

I know that in my heart of hearts
I am not someone who loves the country.
But I do crave the idea of it
to fall upon its soils in relief,

to live in a cabin, in a hollowed out tree
in the Catskill Mountains.
Of course what I really want is America
not the the real one, the wide, wide one

with its purple this and that
and the big gold moon trapped in its branches.

Kate Camp
from How to Be Happy Though Human, VUP, 2020

Travel Bag

The notebook is a surrogate suitcase
in which to pack a road map, a water bottle,
a sharpened pencil, comfortable walking shoes,
a wind breaker, a mood catcher, some folk
music, a violin, cranberry nut mix, seasonal
fruit, a sailing ship, a glimpse of moonlight,
a well-thumbed dictionary, seven memorable novels,
five yoga positions, a braided river,
a tide chart, another violin, a view of clouds,
a pink travel mug, a philosophy of doing,
a philosophy of seeing, a guidebook to verbs,
an old cardigan, stepping stones, changing tides,
a light switch, woollen socks, ginger tea,
a book mark, a mountain to climb.

Paula Green
from Road Trip, a work in progress

Riding the train

As the river consumes its banks
I tell you, yes – as the sky

sucks the sea up into its chalky glare
at noon, as the stars

leak salty dew on the palms and the palm frond’s
jagged shadow disfigures

the stonemason’s perfectly furled siesta –
I’m lost, somehow, at the frontiers

of what’s distinct, of
waking and sleeping, seeing and dreaming.

I’m riding the train.
Don’t know if I’m blind

or in the longest tunnel, now, on the whole
bright coast, or what the difference is.

Ian Wedde
from Arriving blind, in Good Business, AUP, 2009

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Airini Beautrais picks Erik Kennedy

Leave a reply

Gap in My CV

I had this belt buckle with a picture of Karl Marx’s face on it. It was a real talking point, let me tell you. A big brass depiction of the beardy philosopher around my waist while I was in the supermarket, in the street, at the garden centre, drawing people’s eyes to me and making them think of the great currents of history.

So what happened was I was swimming in the lake one Saturday and someone stole my belt! I sprinted to the shore like one of those daft frogs that runs on water like someone’s electrocuting it, but the thief was hotfooting it away already. Well, what would you do? I threw on my trousers, held them up with one hand and chased the purloiner like an avenging spirit.

The thief was resourceful. He checked into spas and camouflaged himself in the mud baths, so I had to do the same, soaking in the hot, therapeutic slurry like some blissed-out predator. He’d go into a pub and disappear from view, so I’d have no choice but to order pints all day and watch the door to see if I could collar him when he made a break for it.

I did that for six months, and I was so tired at the end of it that I took a good long rest for another six months. So that’s what goes on my CV for late 2023 and early 2024, between ‘Office Oaf’ and ‘Sales Dick’. No, I didn’t get the belt back.

Erik Kennedy
from Sick Power Trip, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

‘Gap in my CV’ by Erik Kennedy

I reviewed Erik’s poetry collection Sick Power Trip for Radio NZ last year and immediately loved it. The poem that resonated with me the most, and which I really enjoy reading out loud to other people, is ‘Gap in My CV’.

The gap in the CV is a real-life dilemma for a lot of writers and other creative practitioners. Many of us find it hard to juggle the ‘day job’ with a creative career. Many creative projects take a lot of time, space and dedication to come through to completion. But, if you quit your job to write a book, will you ever get another job? Will potential employers look at your CV and ask why there’s a six-month gap, and will they still want to employ you if you say you were writing poems during that time? I am not sure if this is what was on Erik’s mind when he wrote this poem, but it’s what comes to my mind, and heart, when I read it. ‘Gap in My CV’ treats the subject with characteristic gusto, telling the story of a person who has to explain the gap between their roles as ‘office oaf’ and ‘sales dick’. As it turns out, they have been on a long, exhausting journey to find the thief who has stolen their Karl Marx belt buckle, which has taken six months, and they have then needed another six months to recover from it. The fact that it’s Karl Marx on the belt buckle gives the whole poem a beautiful underpinning of irony. It’s a poem sitting amongst other poems that deal with serious political subjects, sometimes with rage, often with humour. It’s a very generous collection. I feel seen by this poem, and by this book.

Airini Beautrais is a poet, writer and teacher based in Whanganui. Her most recent publication is the essay collection The Beautiful Afternoon (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024).

Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime(2018), all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). He is the poetry editor of takahē and an adjunct fellow in English at the University of Canterbury. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Te Herenga Waka University page

Poetry Shelf celebrates the Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry shortlist: Erik Kennedy picks favourites

Leave a reply

Sick Power Trip, Erik Kennedy
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Erik’s collection has stuck with me for a number of reasons. I have never read a collection quite like it and I love that. It feels like there are two significant settings. Firstly, an extraordinary band of wit and humour, with unexpected scenarios, shifting angles and points of view. Secondly, the necessary and imperative knottiness of humanity, from exposed self to a wider global reach. Not an either or view, but an incredible shifting light on how to live and how to survive. A poetic prism on the contemporary world that might be sharp, jagged, wise, personal.

Paula Green, Poetry Shelf

To celebrate placement on The Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry shortlist, I invited the four poets to choose some favourite things. Third up Erik Kennedy.

Erik Kennedy chooses favourites

Four photos
(a favourite object, place, poetry book, album)

Three sets of three

Three favourite words in your poetry toolkit
But, only, if. Powerhouses of rhetoric.

Three things that matter to you when you read and write poems
I like a first line that’s a poem on its own. I hope that if I’m being lied to in a poem, there’s a good reason for it. And I like to have my priors demolished.

Three poets who have inspired you
Agony to have to do this. Today . . . George Herbert, Norman MacCaig, Natalie Shapero.

One question

Why or how does your poetry book matter to you?
Well, it’s the truest of my books, both personally and artistically. And that feels big. I think readers have sensed that, because the reactions I have got to Sick Power Trip go far beyond anything I heard about the first two. It’s like it took me until my forties to be able to write with the honesty of a teenager. But it takes as long as it takes, I guess. 

One poem

Shop Floor Layout Algorithm

It was with palpable relief that, after a protracted illness, I got back to spending money again.

Economically inactive for October and November, I might as well have been dead instead of just feeling dead.

I got a glimpse of the great beyond, where there are no smart kettles reduced to clearance.

Now I have been in the aisles again, moving slowly and fragilely through the optimised layout of the world.

I have sojourned through an aisle rammed with 900 kilos of chocolate Santas I’m not going to buy because they’ve got dairy in them.

And I thought to myself, in the climate of that aisle, Not everything is about me. 

I thought about the things that are about me.

And I went to look for the aisle where they keep the fully-realised lives, doubtless alongside the wax food wraps and the fancy vinegars.

Erik Kennedy
from Sick Power Trip

Erik Kennedy (he/him) is the author of the poetry collections Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), both with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like berlin lit, FENCE, The Florida Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Full Poetry Shelf review here and reading by Erik here

Erik picks a favourite poem from the book

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf celebrates the Ockham NZ 2026 Book Awards Poetry Long List: Erik Kennedy

2 Replies

Poetry Shelf has invited poets to choose a poem from their longlisted collections and to write a few comments on the poem and poetry. Today Erik Kennedy:

Sick Power Trip, Erik Kennedy
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Animals on Leads

We entered the town and the first thing we saw
was a woman taking her ferret for a walk.
‘Nice day for it,’ I said significantly. The ferret
was going everywhere at once, an absolute possibility engine

producing the energy of a ten-man brawl in a two-man toilet.
And us, should we visit the town’s oldest church
with its medieval eagle lectern and greensand voussoirs,
or should we ramble to the squinty, stony seafront, walled in

by white gin-palace-style hotels? Let’s let the twitchy ferret
be our compass needle, straining against its bonds,
the confident quadrupedal scamperer pulling its minder along
until she’s going north and south, finding nothing and God.

Erik Kennedy

‘Animals on Leads’ is perhaps not a typical Sick Power Trip poem. It doesn’t lean into the collection’s preoccupations with things like illness and politics and war. It is explicitly not set in Aotearoa. And there is barely any glumness to it; it is almost chipper. But I like it a lot because I like poems that tell true stories, and I wish I had more of them. (The problem is that I don’t lead an interesting enough life to generate reams of fascinating ‘true story poems’.)

The setting of the poem is Eastbourne, East Sussex. There are two solid clues as to the location. ‘The town’s oldest church / with its medieval eagle lectern and greensand voussoirs’ is St Mary the Virgin, which is an absolutely stonking Grade I listed building. I lifted the language in that second line directly from the leaflet about the church’s architecture. And ‘the squinty, stony seafront, walled in // by white gin-palace-style hotels’ is a feature of Eastbourne more than any other South Coast resort town. I rate Eastbourne surprisingly highly. On looks it is at least an 8 out of 10. On culture it is becoming more like Brighton. The sea itself is pretty clean, which is a luxury in twenty-first-century England. And it has a wonderful collection of Eric Ravilious works at the Towner gallery.

And of course a third way we know the poem is not set here is the presence of a pet ferret. A ferret is an animal that certainly doesn’t belong in New Zealand, given that its great passion in life is eating birds and eggs. But in England, being walked on a lead, a ferret is a different proposition altogether. It stands for chaotic exuberance. The lines ‘The ferret / was going everywhere at once, an absolute possibility engine // producing the energy of a ten-man brawl in a two-man toilet’ have probably earned me more compliments for their deranged splendidness than any other lines I have ever written. Something in this image speaks to people.

It might be obvious to say this, but the ferret is not the only animal ‘on a lead’ in the poem. The owner of the ferret, dragged about according to her mad mustelid’s whims, is in my view also an animal on a lead. I mean, we all are, in one way or another. A lead always connects two animals, and the hierarchical relationship between them may not be what you would expect. I think there is some joy in the serendipitous meanderings of creatures without meaningful plans. Quite a lot of joy, in fact. When I said ‘Nice day for it’ to the woman in line 3 of the poem, I really meant it.

Erik Kennedy

Erik Kennedy (he/him) is the author of the poetry collections Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), both with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like berlin lit, FENCE, The Florida Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

From Poetry Shelf review:
“Erik’s collection has stuck with me for a number of reasons. I have never read a collection quite like it and I love that. It feels like there are two significant settings. Firstly, an extraordinary band of wit and humour, with unexpected scenarios, shifting angles and points of view. Secondly, the necessary and imperative knottiness of humanity, from exposed self to a wider global reach. Not an either or view, but an incredible shifting light on how to live and how to survive. A poetic prism on the contemporary world that might be sharp, jagged, wise, personal.” Full review here and reading by Erik here

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf review and reading: Sick Power Trip by Erik Kennedy

2 Replies

Sick Power Trip, Erik Kennedy
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Mujaddara

I know. I know what’s happening elsewhere.
While I mess around with my kitchenware.from

 

‘Autumn Couplets’

Every time I review a new poetry collection, it feels like I am holding poetry itself to the light, discovering things about how poems might work, what they might deliver, what they might spark in a reader.

Erik Kennedy’s sublime new collection, Sick Power Trip, got me musing on how poetry might stand as a prism. A poem might be held to get a view, then swivelled to get a different view, and then another, and then again. Each time I turn a page in Sick Power Trip, it’s a prismatic surprise. Unexpected. Utterly fertile. I love it.

Erik’s collection has stuck with me for a number of reasons. I have never read a collection quite like it and I love that. It feels like there are two significant settings. Firstly, an extraordinary band of wit and humour, with unexpected scenarios, shifting angles and points of view. Secondly, the necessary and imperative knottiness of humanity, from exposed self to a wider global reach. Not an either or view, but an incredible shifting light on how to live and how to survive. A poetic prism on the contemporary world that might be sharp, jagged, wise, personal.

Even the pronouns, particularly the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ are multi-tendrilled. The voice speaking is prismatic, drawing us into a stretching field of possibilities, vulnerabilities, recognitions. Nothing is set concrete here. I love this.

Let me shift the prism again for you, in a collection that reveals both the positives and negatives of situations, poetry that is mindful of an impulse to decipher, to muse upon sides, to navigate the good and the bad and the inbetween. There’s involvement and not involvement. Darkness and lightness splintering, merging, resisting clear borders.

And always, let me underline this, there is always the ripple of surprise, in turning each page, within the poem itself. I love this. For example, going shopping after illness:

I thought about the things that are abut me.

And I went to look for the aisle where they keep the fully realised lives,
doubtless alongside the wax food wraps and the fancy vinegars.

 

from ‘Shop Floor Layout Algorithm’

Another stunning example, the notion (or experience) of consolation. Wit and wisdom again refracting. Self fragility and collective strength. The poet holds the prism poem along the degree to which one can understand what someone is going through. Here is the final stanza, it resonates so deeply:

That’s why I can picture it
but can’t imagine what it feels like
to be a phone,
delicately poised on the arm of a chair,
that gets one message too many
and vibrates onto the floor.

 

from ‘Consolations’ 73

I want to share so many of the poems in the book with you, so you too can experience the glorious settings. I like how a word or idea might pose like a mise en abyme – inside this thought (word) another thought (word), inside this light refracting, another light that surprises startles delights. Take the poem offering an analogy on thinking, poised on the moment in a fable when the thorn pulled from a lion’s paw turns out to be a little lion, and the whole progression and stability and expectation of thought or story is in jeopardy.

And then, most importantly, how to deliver and absorb the poem prism in a time when the world is so damn awry. I keep swearing I won’t mention this in a review, but it’s the monster in my kitchen. As I read, I pick up on how doing is in partnership with thinking, how in one poem protest might be deflating tyres of SVUs and in another poem caring might be hugging trees like a 70s hippy. Again the vital oscillation. I am thinking this. Writing poems might be a form of protesting, sharp insistent necessary protesting (listen to the three poems below), but it is also a form of caring. I love this. I love this so very much.

On multiple occasions, a single poem stalls (shadows?) me with its prismatic effects. Surprise turns alongside shards of wisdom alongside physical detail alongside acute global and local concern, with every effect housed within writing that is sublimely fluent. Read ‘How a Year Ends’ for example. This poem. This magnificent poem. Try this stanza:

A year is a road
that ends at the sea
in an afterthought of a town,
just a few weatherbeaten houses,
some indifferent trees,
a small picnic area,
and a one-eyed cat
wandering around proprietorially.
You drive here
because it is here.

 

from ‘How a Year Ends’

Maybe reading this collection is akin to a snow globe effect. Every time I hold a poem to the light and dark of my reading, and let the poetry shake and settle in my mind, I feel the sharp sweet delight of surprise and wonder. On the back of the book (always the last thing I read), it states “Kennedy reminds us that some things remain true and vital: self-care, empathy and solidarity”. And that is exactly why I love this collection so very much. Let us put these words in our pockets and carry them over close the coming months: self-care, empathy, solidarity.

I went out into the day with my symptoms. The sun made the swans look
like harps. I appreciated the silhouettes of buildings. I scrumped apples
from over a fence. My symptoms were still with me but also not with me.
I was loving them. I was setting them free.

 

from ‘Self-Affirming Mantra’ 

a reading

Erik reads: ‘Bildungsroman’, ‘I Like Rich People, but I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One Myself’ and ‘The $6 Pepper Song’

Erik Kennedy is the author of two previous books of poems, both with Te Herenga Waka University Press: the Ockham-shortlisted There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018) and Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022). Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Cover design: Todd Atticus
Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf’s cafe reading for NZ Poetry Day plus breaking news

6 Replies

Later in the year I want to launch a series of Poetry Shelf Live events around the country because I want to get back out in the world, and work offline as much as I do online. In the meantime, assembling poetry readings on Poetry Shelf gives us all a chance to hear poetry off the page. I will be doing more of this over the coming months!

To celebrate National Poetry Day, I offer you a suite of nine readings, not quite the same as being in a cafe or bookshop and getting a live poetry experience, but hearing poets read is such a heart-nourishing treat.

Poetry Shelf offers heartfelt congratulations to our new National Poet Laureate, Robert Sullivan. Robert is a terrific choice. His debut collection Star Waka (1999) was a groundbreaking arrival and the subsequent collections have added extraordinary threads, light and aroha to our poetry kete. Robert is also an anthologist, editor, festival participant in Aotearoa and overseas, currently President of the New Zealand Poetry Society / Te Rōpū Toikupu o Aotearoa and is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa. He belongs to Ngāpuhi Nui Tonu (Ngāti Hau, and Ngāti Manu), and Kai Tahu (Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki), with affiliations to Ngāti Raukawa, and Ngāi Tai, and is also of Irish, Scottish and English descent. He lives in Oāmaru on the coastline known as Te Tai o Āraiteuru.

This news is the poetry cream on our national poetry celebrations.

Happy Poetry Day to poetry readers and writers across Aotearoa!

The National Poetry Day page with event schedule.

The readings

Hana Pera Aoake

excerpts from Some Helpful Models of Grief (Compound Press, 2025)

Xiaole Zhan

‘{Untitled}’ and ‘Learning the character for soul (靈)
contains the character for rain (雨)’

Jackson McCarthy

Three Southern Songs: ‘Punatapu’ ‘Arrowtown’, ‘Kawarau’. Then ‘Happiness’, ‘Song’

Sophie van Waardenberg

‘Self-Portrait as Adolescent Covered in Flour’, ‘Hymn to the Insomniac in Fool’s Spring’ from No Good (Auckland University Press, 2025)

Nadezhda Macey

‘Uranga’, ‘Syntax’ (from Starling Issue 18), ‘Victoria Park’, ‘Capsicum is a New Zealand Word?’

Josiah Morgan

three untitled poems from ‘act three’, in i’m still growing, Dead Bird Books, 2025

Erik Kennedy

‘Individualistic Societies’, ‘Notes Towards a Theory of Fun’ and ‘We’ve All Been There’ from Sick Power Trip, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Grace Yee

‘with two black dates for sweetness’ and ‘my father was not a gardener’ from Joss: a History, Giramondo Poetry, 2025

Anne Kennedy

‘The Black Drop: My History of Ugly’, from The Sea Walks into a Wall (AUP, 2021)

The poets

Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Hinerangi, Tainui/Waikato) is an artist, writer, and sweaty milf from Aotearoa. Hana’s first book, a bathful of kawakawa and hot water, was published with Compound Press in 2020. Their second book, Blame it on the rain was published in 2025 with no more poetry (Australia). They just released a third book, Some helpful models of grief with compound press and are also publishing a fourth book of essays, On how to be with Discipline (Australia) in 2026.  Hana is edging through a PhD at Auckland University of Technology.

Xiaole Zhan (詹小乐) is a Chinese-Aotearoa writer and composer based in Naarm. Their work features in Auckland University Press’s New Poets 11. They are a 2025 Creative New Zealand Fellowship recipient, a 2025 Red Room Poetry Varuna Fellowship recipient, the 2024 Kat Muscat Fellow, as well as the winner of the 2023 Kill Your Darlings Non-Fiction Prize. Their name in Chinese means ‘Little Happy’, but can also be read as ‘Little Music’.

Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori, Lebanese, and Pākehā descent. His work has been published in Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Landfall, Starling, The Spinoff, and elsewhere, and he serves as an editor at Symposia. You can read more of his work at https://linktr.ee/jacksonmccarthy. 

Sophie van Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her work can be found in Cordite, Starling, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Takahē and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection is No Good (AUP, 2025). 

Nadezhda Macey (she/her) is a student of English Literature and French at Te Herenga Waka. She is also a poet and artist, you can find more @nadezhda.4rt, and in magazines starting with ‘S’: Starling, Salient, and Symposia.

Josiah Morgan (Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Maniapoto) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Ōtautahi. His latest book i’m still growing is out with Dead Bird Books now in all good bookstores. His other books were all released in the United States, including his hybrid text The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was performed as a six-hour-long performance artwork in Auckland Pride 2024. He believes in magic and the power of words to transform. He is currently working on a chapbook called Black Window, a new full-length book, and a theatrical adaptation of Faust in collaboration with Hagley Theatre School.

Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). He lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Grace Yee is the author of Chinese Fish (Giramondo), which won the Victorian Prize for Literature in Australia, and the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Chinese Fish will be published by Akoya in the UK in 2026. Her second book Joss: A History (also Giramondo) was released in June 2025. She lives in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri Land. 

Anne Kennedy is a Tāmaki Makaurau poet, novelist and teacher. Awards include the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry. Recent books are The Sea Walks into a Wall, The Ice Shelf and, as editor, Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand. Anne is the current editor of AUP’s New Poets series. 

Poetry Shelf celebrates The Venetian Blind Poems: a gathering of illness poems

2 Replies

The Venetian Blind Poems, Paula Green, The Cuba Press, 2025

When I wrote Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry (MUP, 2019), I built a house, dividing the book into rooms, and then moving through open doors and windows to the wider world. The book was neither a formal history nor a theoretical overview of New Zealand’s women’s poetry but a way of collecting, building recouping valuing the poetic voices of women in Aotearoa. As I moved through the rooms in the house the themes accumulated: politics, poetics, love, the domestic, self, relations, illness, death, location, the maternal, home, voice.

The book came out in 2019, not that long ago, and I was interested to read ‘The sickbed’ chapter again. I began the chapter by saying inquisitive audiences often ask, ‘Why write poetry?’. I still claim the answers are myriad: it makes us feel good, we are addicted to wordplay, we can squeeze writing a poem in between domestic chores, parenting, scholarly endeavour, work commitments. We might crave public attention, awards, good reviews. We might simply have to write. Our poetry might reflect a love of music, storytelling, suspense, wit, surprise, attraction to the unsayable or beauty. We might write poems at the kitchen table, in our head as we walk, run, dream or dillydally. We might favour condensation and pocket size writing or expansion and long sequences. We might write from a sick bed.

My collection Slipstream (AUP, 2010) came out of my breast cancer experience. I refer to it in Wild Honey: ‘poetry was an energy boost, a way to enhance my sense of wellbeing’. As I wrote, at least a year after the experience, I did not feel I was writing poems – nothing on the page earned the label ‘poem’ in my view — but I was conscious that the white space, the juxtapositions, the assembled lists and the melody were reaching for the poetic. I did not want to summon the dark, middle of the night slumps, but rather to show illness can change the way you see the day as well as live the day.

The Venetian Blind Poems is a little different in that I wrote it in the moment, in hospital and then back home on the recovery road. But I recognised similar motivations to write.

My new collection has been out in the world for a fortnight now, and it feels so very special. To be in Motutapu Ward and the Day Stay Ward this week, signing copies for nurses, hearing them read fragments aloud, reminded me that poetry is an incredible way of connecting. I am still in a thicket of appointments as I fine tune the road ahead, but this fortnight feels like like my time in hospital, when so many poets sent me a poem in a card. The emails you have sent me these past two weeks, so thoughtful and caring, have shone fresh light on how and why poetry is a gift. On why we write and sometimes publish poetry. I will treasure your emails for a long time (and reply soon)!

More than anything, The Venetian Blind Poems is a way of saying thank you to the doctors and nurses who have given, and are giving so much. I offer an enormous bouquet of thanks to Mary McCallum and Paul Stewart at The Cuba Press, for the beautiful book, and for inviting such terrific responses to post on social media by poets who have read it.

Now its back to normal transmission! I have new ideas for Poetry Shelf bubbling like my sour dough starter, manuscripts to finish, a treasury of books to review, emails to answer, a few more appointments, and most excitingly, I am ready to get my secret seedling idea off the ground: Poetry Shelf Goes Live. Yes! Soon I will be back in the world organising live poetry events around the country.

A cluster of illness poems

The waiting game

begins with someone calling your name before you
wait to have your blood taken in a windowless room.
Wait for the stultifying thoughts of red and disease
to pass. Wait for the phone call, for relief to wash
over you. And while you are waiting I recommend you
dance like the memory of sweat easing down his
throat; roll open like the drum beat of your limbs
in sync; tear through your wildest nights, still lit in
hopeful neon; cry like the Christmas you lost your
last grandparent; and sing like the forgotten violin
slowly coming undone in your muscle memory.
If you do not allow yourself to sleep in peace
with your worries, you will find yourself awake
at the bottom of a very deep, very secret lake.

Chris Tse
Turbine, 2014


A Final Warning

I walked past the stars
the silence of grandfathers

I was going somewhere but where

I went left at first then right
then way off course then back to somewhere

near the middle
did this mean I was ready to die

well they’ve been testing me for everything
I think I’ve got the lot

Bill Manhire
from Honk Honk, The Anchorstone Press, 2022

The Night Shift

I wake on the ward, afloat on ketamine, fentanyl,
see sky-blue morphine swifts roost nearby
in pleated paper thimbles

and some uneasy instinct tugs my gaze
to a scuff mark on the lino floor.
Coal-dark, it smolders. I stall.

A voice reassures me it’s just a graze
left by the wheel of some routine machine:
IV, PCA line, heart monitor screen.

Yet as I ease deep-cut core and leaden legs
over the distant side of the high bed
I can’t shake this need to stare

not quite in fear: not quite.

For last night, creatures came.
They arrived en masse, nodded, swayed,
pressed into each dimmed cubicle,

their copper eyes bright-candled,
lips pouched over strong, proud teeth,
their heads bowed in silent inspection;

marmalade lions with oxen feet,
crested birds with antlers, candy-pink teats,
all crowded, crowded round each bed

as the window in time was fast contracting,
and they wanted us to see before our minds
sealed tough with the fibers of logic, denial.

Their fur packed tight as green florets on catkins.
Their horns, colossal black spikes, gleamed like grand pianos.
Such mass and strength in their embedded weaponry,

yet still, they withheld their crush and maim.

The breath and bunt of their herded skulls
said we are the unbroken in you, don’t be afraid,
and I saw through the seep of dawn

that soon like guardians they will gather
each one of us, our failing forms absorbed
into their warm, strong-walled veins

until we too watch
each figure on the bed
as something invisible shifts
in the intricate balance of matter and spirit.

So it is awe, not dread, that asks me
to leave the ground undisturbed
where they gathered,
to skirt carefully the sign one left
like a scorched hoof print
as if they had stood in fire
to show they bear time’s pyre for us,

our wild sentries, our wild sentries.

Emma Neale
from Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Otago University Press, 2024

(A lifetime of sentences)

Soon, I could leave my body without prompts. The artist’s concept of the birth of a star, or I broke my name until the fibres separated and lost their coats. My thirst for windows kept me indoors. My gaze wandered across the suburbs of childhood, faces stammering with shyness, bodies masquerading as furniture. Initial mass and luminosity determine duration, but my sensibility comes to require an object. Here, the word “system” implies a level of certainty that is unwarranted. Some of those memories were not written by me, so they are memos, at home on my desk, but still authoritative. Now, instead of a pupil, there’s a screensaver. It was late. The room was empty. A lifetime of sentences which at first glance seem superfluous, but whose value is later understood. One thing leads to a mother. Soon enough, a flock of children came running and tapped on the glass. When I reached the bottom of the stares, I looked up.

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle
selected by Kiri Pianaha Wong and was published a fine line and also Best NZ Poems 2011

it is a wedding cavalcade
in which I take your day of birth
and marry it with ten pink tulips
to mine     look, behind us on the road
sadness and unutterable joy
leaping over the rocks
how we were those people in the crowd
unmindful of everything 
except stepping along together 
under our parasols
what’s wrong with that?
see, the road is still there
still ahead and behind
losing its mind and leaping
over the rocks with its train
of clowns who are careless
careless careless and will never
behave any differently
believing themselves arm in arm
with all they need
to sustain life on a distant planet
choogaloo, this is all you need
tulips and a parasol
to keep off the bigger bits of debris
falling out of the sky
don’t be sad
there is every chance 
we are just now resident
in two minds regarding each other
tenderly, quizzically, uproariously
as a wedding cavalcade

Michele Leggot
from Milk & Honey, Auckland University Press, 2005

What’s the time, Mr Wolff-Parkinson-White?

Press palm against skin
feel its breathless sprinting

            count 230 beats in a minute
            count six sibling arguments
            count four gecko squawks

gulp two glasses of water
phone the absent dad three times
return to the couch

           count 194 beats—and whoah
           with the flutter of a moth
           it slows down to a jog

steady rhythm of 75

Fire heart    
                          Sea heart   
                                             Earth heart

Calm waters as a child
now more fire than earth
chased by a white wolf

Want to feed my child
             ruby corn        raspberries
red meat        cherry tomatoes
             pomegranate bursts
sugar and acid
enough to woo a rebel

The heart heals itself
between beats, reassures
Elizabeth Smither

Mikaela Nyman

Amy Marguerite picked a poem from Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium, a book I now have on order! But sadly I didn’t manage to get permission to post the poem but you can listen to Shira read it here.

Self-Affirming Mantra

I was searching my symptoms online. Disturbed sleep led to fatigue which led to post-viral condition and also to alcohol abuse and liver disease and unthinkable cancers which all led to conclusions about society and how one operates in it, how someone can be rational and maladaptive at the same time, how resilience is just a word in a PowerPoint, how years of work go into the manufacture of one unit of anxiety (a person), and how each unit, although similar to others in many ways, is unique, the product of a freakish and golden permutation of inputs, which led me back to my usual searches for wars and politicians and racing drivers and recipes and animals and islands and colours.

I went out into the day with my symptoms. The sun made the swans look like harps. I appreciated the silhouettes of buildings. I scrumped apples from over a fence. My symptoms were still with me but also not with me. I was loving them. I was setting them free.

Erik Kennedy
from Poto | Short (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025)

Paula Green in conversation with Anna Jackson
A collage conversation with nine poets
The Cuba Press page

Poetry Shelf launch speech series: Claudia Herz Jardine launches Erik Kennedy’s ‘Sick Power Trip’

Leave a reply

Sick Power Trip, Erik Kennedy, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025
(photos courtesy of Scorpio Books)

Tēnā koutou katoa.
Ki ngā mate, haere, haere, haere atu rā.
E mihi ana ki te iwi e tau nei, Ngāi Tūāhuriri, tēnā koutou.
Ki a tātou e tau nei, kia ora koutou.
Nō Mīere me Ingarangi ōku tīpuna.
Kei te noho au ki Ōtautahi.
Kei kaituhituhi ahau e mahi ana.
Ko Claudia Herz Jardine tōku ingoa.
Tēnā koutou katoa.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming. A caveat that these things aren’t expressed so gracefully in reo Pākehā; with my opening remarks I acknowledge the deceased, notably the poet John Allison; I recognise Ngāi Tūāhuriri, our local iwi and tangata whenua; I welcome you all here, in Scorpio Books, to this celebration of Erik Kennedy’s pukapuka Sick Power Trip.

My name is Claudia Herz Jardine. My ancestors, like Erik’s, came from far away- and, also like Erik, I call Ōtautahi Christchurch home and am prepared to defend it from further environmental assault with my life, my poems and my needle-nose pliers.

The first image of Sick Power Trip that wedged itself in my head was the “absolute possibility engine”- a ferret on a leash as observed in the poem ‘Animals On Leads’. At the time, my brother-in-law had his girlfriend’s dearly beloved and deceased pet ferret in his freezer as they waited for the cost of taxidermy to go down – this going down in price could be enabled by free market conditions, or the death of another ferret i.e. taxidermy at a quantity discount. All the ferrets in my life were distinctly lacking in possibilities, and then Erik came along to our critical writing group with his poem. I didn’t have much critical feedback for Erik- I only recall scrawling, “love ‘the energy of a ten-man brawl in a two-man toilet’.” A phrase that feels like it has the same amount of plosive consonants as a ferret should have claws.

Many months later Erik mentioned he had a manuscript ready. He emailed it to me. I made approximately five suggestions. My email sign-off was: “It’s a stacked deck! A pack of heavyweights! An all-star team!!” This ratio of suggestions to compliments bodes well for Erik. I read it all in one sitting, and by standing before you all tonight, I declare that me and my poetic sensibilities were wholeheartedly entertained and intrigued by this book.

To make some hazy, summative stabs at the book now, Sick Power Trip is a sort of wealth redistribution weathervane. The poems in this book, together, seem to say- if you have THIS much money, can you please do the decent thing and use it to make THESE lives better? Though the poems are stacked with ‘I’ statements, the ‘I’ is always asking; why aren’t we kinder to each other? Why do the people with the most get away with caring about others the least?

We live in an age in which any possible friction in our daily lives is viewed by Big Tech Companies as a money-maker. We have computers in our hands, a supermarket monopoly willing to visit us at home, and apps that write small talk and argumentative rebuttals for us. The narrator of ‘Individualistic Societies’ (page 11) states: “I fixed every problem I ever had until I couldn’t, at which point I became the problem.” For as long as we are encouraged to remove friction from our lives by paying money, the environment and its indigenous populations will be exploited. Skip ahead to page 93, ‘Someone Put an Ancient Burial Ground Right Where a Hotel Needs to Go,’ and an archaeological worker has a vision of excavated bones filling the city- “One day this project will be done and the building that even / its designer’s mother doesn’t love will spend its seasons here… What is allowed to endure is sometimes a second-choice thing / and the ones choosing are as likely to be thinking about the weather / as the future. Is it going to rain? Is the smart oven set?”

Yes, these poems are fringed with scathing, cynical Erik-ness. They also serve as an untraditional curriculum vitae for why, in the end times, Erik Kennedy will be on the shortlist for holding the newly-designed flag while jumping up and down on top of the bunkers as we sweep through Central Otago, shelling billionaires from their boltholes. This will be a pointy time, and unlike the narrator of ‘Notes Towards a Theory of Fun’ (page 50), no one will be getting arrested for kidnapping fossil fuel executives and shouting (quote) “Imma rubber-band this motherfucker up like a bunch of kale.”

Some notes on craft; Erik knows when to end a line, use an adverb, when to turn up the dial on the presence of the narrator and how to get out of the way. Erik and I share a love of whittling the pointy end of the poem first and then making the grip as comfortable as we see fit. So, watch as he casually wraps serious themes in humour to make the weight a little easier to bear- you could “die in a hail of 5-inch shells / or mild social disapproval,” you were either “raised by scorpions,” or you can care about the people of Gaza, you can be sad and lonely, or you can get involved in your local dogging group- just get out there and network!

Importantly, these are poems about thinking and caring. Erik cares about us. Erik cares about all animals. Erik cares about the planet. And Erik, in his day-to-day ways, turns up for other poets and throws his support behind our scene. When Erik had long Covid and stayed home, we missed him, and it was nice of him to invent the word “wonkening” while he was away.

Thank you all for listening to my speech. Congratulations, Erik, on another fantastic volume of poems. Can we all give him a big round of applause?

A warm thank you to Te Herenga Waka University Press and our speakers for this evening – and please join me again in congratulating Erik Kennedy.

Claudia Herz Jardine, 10/07/25

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Poetry Shelf Occasional Reviews: No Other Place to Stand

Leave a reply

No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa Ranapiri, Auckland University Press, 2022

Auckland University Press is to be celebrated for its stellar poetry anthologies. No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand offers an eclectic, and indeed electrifying, selection of climate change poetry. The editors, Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa Ranapiri, are all frontline poets themselves.

The dedication resonates and stalls your entry into the book because it is so apt: “To those fighting for our future / and those who will live it.”

A terrific foreword by Alice Te Punga Somerville establishes a perfect gateway into the collection. Alice wonders, when climate change is such a mammoth issue, “about the value of the particular, the specific, the local, the here, the now”. What difference will reading and writing make when the world demands action? Alice writes: “Every single poem in this anthology speaks to the relationship between words and worlds.” That in itself is enough of a spur to get a copy of the book, and open up trails of reading, wonder and challenge.

I am spinning on the title. I am turning the word ‘stand’ over and over in my mind like a talisman, a pun, a hook. I am thinking we stand and we speak out, I am thinking we stand because we no longer bear it, and I am thinking we stand together.

The poems selected are both previously published and unpublished. The sources underline the variety and depth of print and online journals currently publishing poetry in Aotearoa: Minarets, Starling, Spin Off, Mayhem, Pantograph Punch, Poetry NZ, Blackmail Press, Overland, Sweet Mammalian, Turbine | Kapohau, Takahē, Stasis, Landfall.

No Other Place to Stand is an essential volume. You can locate its essence, the governing theme, ‘climate change poetry’, yet the writing traverses multiple terrains, with distinctive voices, styles, focal points. I fall into wonder again and again, but there is the music, the political, the personal, the heart stoking, the message sharing. There is the overt and there is the nuanced. There is loud and there is soft. There is clarity and there is enigma. You will encounter a magnificent upsurge of younger emerging voices alongside the presence of our writing elders. This matters. This degree of bridge and connection.

Dinah Hawken has long drawn my eye and heart to the world we inhabit, to the world of sea and bush and mountain, stones, leaves, water, birds. Reading one of her collections is like standing in the heart of the bush or next to the ocean’s ebb and flow. It is message and it is transcendental balm. Her long sublime poem, ‘The uprising’, after presenting gleams and glints of our beloved natural world, responds to the wail that rises in us as we feel so helpless.

6.a.

But all I can do is rise:
both before and after I fall.
All I can do is rally,

all I can do is write
– I can try to see and mark
where and how we are.

All I can do is plant,
all I can do is vote
for the fish, the canoe, the ocean

to survive the rise and fall.
All I can do is plead,
all I can do is call . . .

from ‘The uprising’

I am reading the rich-veined ancestor currents of Tayi Tibble’s ‘Tohunga’, the luminosity of Chris Tse’s ‘Photogenesis’, the impassioned, connecting cries of Selina Tusitala Marsh’s ‘Unity’ and Karlo Mila’s ‘Poem for the Commonwealth, 2018’. Daily routines alongside a child’s unsettling question catch me in Emma Neale’s ‘Wanting to believe in the butterfly effect’. I am carried in the embrace of Vaughan Rapatahana’s ‘he mōteatea: huringa āhuarangi’ with its vital, plain speaking call in both te reo Māori and English.

Take this heart-charged handbook and read a poem a day over the next ninety days. Be challenged; speak, ask, do. I thank the editors and Auckland University Press for this significant anthology, this gift.

Auckland University press page

Jordan Hamel is a Pōneke-based poet and performer. He was the 2018 New Zealand Poetry Slam champion. He uses poetry and performance to create awareness and discourse about environmental and political issues. He is the co-editor of Stasis Journal and his debut poetry collection Everyone is everyone except you was published by Dead Bird Books in 2022.

Rebecca Hawkes is a poet/painter from Canterbury, living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her chapbook ‘Softcore coldsores’ was published in AUP New Poets 5 in 2019. Her first full-length poetry collection, Meat Lovers, was recently unleashed by Auckland University Press. Rebecca edits Sweet Mammalian and is a founding member of popstar poets’ posse Show Ponies.

Erik Kennedy is the author of Another Beautiful Day Indoors (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022) and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (Victoria University Press, 2018), which was shortlisted for best book of poems at the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. He lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Essa Ranapiri (Ngāti Wehi Wehi / Ngāti Takatāpui / Clan Gunn) is a poet from Kirikiriroa. They are part of puku.riri, a local writing group. Their book ransack was published by Victoria University Press in 2019. Give the land back. It’s the only way to fix this mess. They will write until they’re dead. And after that, sing.

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Erik Kennedy’s ‘Lives of the Poets’

1 Reply

Lives of the Poets

There is the possible world in which,
having no safety net
to fall into, I killed myself.

There is the world in which
acclaim came early
with a book called something like
Sex Owls of the Sun,
and the effects of success jaded me,
so I stopped pursuing
the art that I loved.

And there is also the world that was
a succession of cool, forgettable evenings
spent among canapés and loud friends,
in which we aged so slowly
that we hardly noticed it,
until it blurred our vision
like damp creeping into a camera.

Erik Kennedy

Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018) and Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), both with Victoria University Press, and he has co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific forthcoming from Auckland University Press in 2022. His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like FENCE, Hobart, Maudlin House, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.