Erik Kennedy is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Sick Power Trip (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025), shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 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.

What first drew you to poetry, and what keeps you coming back to it?

Imagine, as a strange only child, feeling like you can put your daydreams and shower thoughts into a little machine that will turn them into Art™. Poetry has always given me that feeling. I’m glad it has never gone away.

Tell us about your shortlisted collection. What inspired it, or what do you hope readers discover in its pages?

The elevator pitch is that it’s about both personal and societal sickness. It came out of a period of my life in which I was dealing with the former (long COVID)—and we are all dealing with the latter (inequality, environmental breakdown, warfare). And yet I believe there is a grim satisfaction to be found in seeing the situation expressed clearly; I think readers have responded in that way. And our circumstances are so ridiculous that the poems are naturally full of a sort of gallows humour. I hardly have to try. It’s reality that’s funny, not me.

National Poetry Day is all about encouraging people to read and enjoy poetry. If you could recommend one poem (or poet) for someone who thinks poetry isn't for them, what would you choose and why?

Many possibilities. Among Aotearoa poets, James Brown is someone whose work I never hesitate to recommend. He is simultaneously a poet’s poet and an artist for everyone. Things you’ll find in James’s work: storytelling, mythmaking, raspberry-blowing.

Where do poems usually find you? Do you have a favourite place, ritual or unexpected moment when ideas tend to arrive?

It’s more of a psychic location that I’m looking for than a physical one. I need to be in the right mood—fizzing with a sudden creative impulse, brought into a state of hyperfocus, slightly frustrated with my own unproductivity and looking to immediately whip my artistic life into shape. How do I bring about such a state? Talking to other writers helps. Reading helps. Gigs help. Walking helps. I say that whenever I get the chance to. Walking is the closest thing to a hack that I have.

Is there a line of poetry that has stayed with you over the years? We'd love to hear it (and why it continues to resonate).

These aren’t lines of poetry exactly, but I howl with laughter every time I think about Marianne Moore’s list of suggestions for the name of the car that would become the Ford Edsel. She was sending letters to the Ford Motor Company with the loopiest monikers you’ve ever heard. Mongoose Civique? Pastelogram? (For a car, Marianne?!) Utopian Turtletop is god-tier. This is real-world poetry, and no mistake.

Now that a little time has passed since the awards, what are you working on next, or what can readers look forward to from you?

I’m going to be honest and vulnerable here: I have lots of poems that postdate the book—and I like some of them very much! But I am also feeling a little unsatisfied with their similarity to what I have already done. So I am still figuring out how to make book #4 feel truly fresh to me. (Because if it isn’t fresh to me, it’s not going to feel fresh for readers!) Let’s normalise artists saying that they’re at a bit of a loose end.