Catching Birds’ Eggs
Erik Kennedy, Another Beautiful Day Indoors
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 96pp, NZ$25.00, ISBN 9781776920075
reviewed by Tim Murphy
‘All art is contemporary art’, the installation artist James Turrell once said, ‘because it had to be made when it was now’. This is not an uncontroversial observation, but Erik Kennedy’s second poetry collection, Another Beautiful Day Indoors, certainly strikes a very strong contemporary note by expressly being of the ‘now’. There are two poems, for example, about the current post-pandemic moment. In ‘Post-Pandemic Adaptation’, the poet regrets abandoning his plans for change and instead, ‘accidentally [going] back to the way / things were’, while ‘Anxiety and Executive Function’ contrasts the pre-pandemic ‘having-an-attention-span times’ with now,
It is hard, though, not to absorb many of the meaningful words in Kennedy’s book, given the pressing nature of its recurring themes — capitalist injustice, environmental degradation, and the climate crisis. Of less transient significance than the pandemic, these are the contemporary themes that unify Another Beautiful Day Indoors. They are foregrounded in the book’s epigraphs, particularly the quotations from Ernst Fischer’s 1959 Marxist text, The Necessity of Art, on the ‘decadence’ of ignoring political injustice, and from a 2019 Guardian article by George Monbiot on how the capitalist reliance on perpetual growth has transformed the planet into ‘a sacrifice zone’ in which humanity inhabits ‘the periphery of the profit-making machine’. The second poem in the collection, ‘Studying the Myth of the Flood’, refers to ‘the future’ with the caveat, ‘if there is one’, and several poems address live issues in environmentalist and climate change discourse.
‘Phosphate from Western Sahara’, for example, is prefaced with a note that New Zealand fertiliser companies are the only significant remaining buyers of phosphate from Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara: ‘You can see the phosphate dust from space, / like a tantrum in a sandbox’. ‘Microplastics in Antarctica’ refers to what might be frozen, ‘[s]omewhere in the miles-deep ice’. The First Plant Grown on the Moon’ commemorates the cotton plant grown on the Chinese lunar lander, Chang’e 4, in 2019, and concludes with a rejection of the imperialist ideology associated with the idealist First World War English poet Rupert Brooke. In ‘The Soldier’, Brooke famously wrote that, were he to die in battle, it would ‘enrich’ that ‘corner of a foreign field’ and make it ‘for ever England’. Here, Kennedy has,
Whereas the first and third parts of Another Beautiful Day Indoors are both untitled and contain only poetry — 20 and 21 poems, respectively — variety is introduced by the second part, which is titled, ‘[notes towards a definition of essential work]’. The ten pieces in this part are described by the publisher as ‘magical realist short fictions’. Workers of some description appear in each of these inventive and often wryly humorous stories. Two therapists, for example, are introduced in the first line of ‘Four Life Forms’: ‘I was having an affair with my partner’s therapist, and she was having an affair with mine’. Other workers include a person setting up chairs for a political election debate (‘Setting up the Debate’); a former schoolteacher now working as official printer to an authoritarian regime whose partner has a kiosk in the main square ‘selling floppy hats and sun cream’ (‘Official Printer to the Government’); and a wingsuit flyer who formerly worked as a cabinet maker for magicians (‘Agatha and Florian’). ‘The Planned Obsolescence Rhapsody’ is a Monty Python-esque satire about a town mayor castigating a blacksmith for the ‘unshowy durability’ of his work; the blacksmith in the next village is ‘making shonky items, and people love it’. In a similar vein, the Three Wise Men in ‘The Plot of the Nativity Play’ are unimpressed to hear of the Nazarene birth upon their arrival at Bethlehem:
The workers in ‘The Admin Job Psalm’ are two monks who copy manuscripts as ‘dust motes [dance] in the sunbeams like amoebas’, an appropriate image given the monks’ implied sexlessness. Perhaps the most directly political moment in the short fictions is the description of burglaries as ‘sophisticated, theoretically grounded surgical strikes against our oppressors’ that take campaigns of wealth redistribution ‘out into the community’ (‘Notes Towards a Definition of Essential Work’). Elsewhere in the volume Kennedy expresses solidarity with the ‘small strugglers of life, / the alienated labour, the up-to-their-eyeballs in student debt debtors, / the scrappers who feel like they’re sawing timber with a butter knife / every day . . .’ (‘Young Adult Success Stories’). In these latter lines there is a mix of the literal description of the debtors and the poetic simile concerning the ‘scrappers’, a mix or tension between the literal and the poetic that is found throughout the book.
‘The Class Anxiety Country Song’ is a poem with a wonderfully jaunty opening,
The satire here relies on the clash of diction between the leisurely drawled ‘plain speech’ in the first three lines and the abrupt condensed final line. But sometimes political preoccupations steer the language towards the prosaic — alongside the vivid image of phosphate dust looking ‘like a tantrum in a sandbox’, for example, there is the literal, ‘Sorry, Western Sahara, New Zealand needs this’ (‘Phosphate from Western Sahara’). And while sincerity is expressed in several poems (e.g., ‘The Please Stop Killing Us and Destroying Everything That Sustains Us Society’, ‘Father’s Day’), it seems facetious to reformulate Albert Camus’s famous statement about suicide to suggest that the only ‘really serious philosophical problem’ is whether self-driving cars brake for animals (‘The Autonomous Vehicle Research Centre’).
In its recurrently provocative outlook, however, Another Beautiful Day Indoors succeeds in its obvious political aim of consciousness-raising. Poets and other writers often cite instances demonstrating the power of words, and in the notes, Kennedy writes that ‘Phosphate from Western Sahara’ was originally published online in Milly Magazine in November 2020 but was taken down after the editor received numerous threats ‘from anti-Western Sahara liberation trolls’. Kennedy expresses pride in ‘[pissing] off colonialist reactionaries half a world away’, but regrets that the editor was threatened. The cover photograph by Max Oettli shows a man on a train in Switzerland with his jacket covering his head, and the implied reference to the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand is also found in poems like ‘Microplastics in Antarctica’, which challenge the reader directly, ‘Concerned about those embarrassing flakes? / You should be.’ (The poem ‘expresses the literal ‘hope, hope, hope’ that humanity does not discover the eponymous particles, but unfortunately, they were discovered in June 2022).
Kennedy likens environmental activism to ‘going out in high winds / to catch birds’ eggs / blown from nests’ (‘Activism’), and in today’s world of apathy, skepticism, and fake news, activist poetry may be even more challenging. With this collection, though, Kennedy stakes a claim to be a strongly political voice in the global eco-poetry phenomenon.
when trying to absorb
meaningful words
is like giving a speech
while having your feet
tickled
It is hard, though, not to absorb many of the meaningful words in Kennedy’s book, given the pressing nature of its recurring themes — capitalist injustice, environmental degradation, and the climate crisis. Of less transient significance than the pandemic, these are the contemporary themes that unify Another Beautiful Day Indoors. They are foregrounded in the book’s epigraphs, particularly the quotations from Ernst Fischer’s 1959 Marxist text, The Necessity of Art, on the ‘decadence’ of ignoring political injustice, and from a 2019 Guardian article by George Monbiot on how the capitalist reliance on perpetual growth has transformed the planet into ‘a sacrifice zone’ in which humanity inhabits ‘the periphery of the profit-making machine’. The second poem in the collection, ‘Studying the Myth of the Flood’, refers to ‘the future’ with the caveat, ‘if there is one’, and several poems address live issues in environmentalist and climate change discourse.
‘Phosphate from Western Sahara’, for example, is prefaced with a note that New Zealand fertiliser companies are the only significant remaining buyers of phosphate from Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara: ‘You can see the phosphate dust from space, / like a tantrum in a sandbox’. ‘Microplastics in Antarctica’ refers to what might be frozen, ‘[s]omewhere in the miles-deep ice’. The First Plant Grown on the Moon’ commemorates the cotton plant grown on the Chinese lunar lander, Chang’e 4, in 2019, and concludes with a rejection of the imperialist ideology associated with the idealist First World War English poet Rupert Brooke. In ‘The Soldier’, Brooke famously wrote that, were he to die in battle, it would ‘enrich’ that ‘corner of a foreign field’ and make it ‘for ever England’. Here, Kennedy has,
The moon is full of foreigners,
with our stiff flags and our left-behind shit.
Some corner of a foreign field will be forever
Earth. Let us tend to it.
Whereas the first and third parts of Another Beautiful Day Indoors are both untitled and contain only poetry — 20 and 21 poems, respectively — variety is introduced by the second part, which is titled, ‘[notes towards a definition of essential work]’. The ten pieces in this part are described by the publisher as ‘magical realist short fictions’. Workers of some description appear in each of these inventive and often wryly humorous stories. Two therapists, for example, are introduced in the first line of ‘Four Life Forms’: ‘I was having an affair with my partner’s therapist, and she was having an affair with mine’. Other workers include a person setting up chairs for a political election debate (‘Setting up the Debate’); a former schoolteacher now working as official printer to an authoritarian regime whose partner has a kiosk in the main square ‘selling floppy hats and sun cream’ (‘Official Printer to the Government’); and a wingsuit flyer who formerly worked as a cabinet maker for magicians (‘Agatha and Florian’). ‘The Planned Obsolescence Rhapsody’ is a Monty Python-esque satire about a town mayor castigating a blacksmith for the ‘unshowy durability’ of his work; the blacksmith in the next village is ‘making shonky items, and people love it’. In a similar vein, the Three Wise Men in ‘The Plot of the Nativity Play’ are unimpressed to hear of the Nazarene birth upon their arrival at Bethlehem:
Anything else?
‘The pub up the road is doing a two-for-one fish and chips night tonight,’ he said.
‘Okay, my friends,’ I said, ‘you were right. This is a miracle.’
The star we had followed was blazing directly overhead, shrinking our shadows almost to nothing.
The workers in ‘The Admin Job Psalm’ are two monks who copy manuscripts as ‘dust motes [dance] in the sunbeams like amoebas’, an appropriate image given the monks’ implied sexlessness. Perhaps the most directly political moment in the short fictions is the description of burglaries as ‘sophisticated, theoretically grounded surgical strikes against our oppressors’ that take campaigns of wealth redistribution ‘out into the community’ (‘Notes Towards a Definition of Essential Work’). Elsewhere in the volume Kennedy expresses solidarity with the ‘small strugglers of life, / the alienated labour, the up-to-their-eyeballs in student debt debtors, / the scrappers who feel like they’re sawing timber with a butter knife / every day . . .’ (‘Young Adult Success Stories’). In these latter lines there is a mix of the literal description of the debtors and the poetic simile concerning the ‘scrappers’, a mix or tension between the literal and the poetic that is found throughout the book.
‘The Class Anxiety Country Song’ is a poem with a wonderfully jaunty opening,
I pull into the station,
tell them where I’m headed,
ask which has fewer calories,
diesel or unleaded.
The satire here relies on the clash of diction between the leisurely drawled ‘plain speech’ in the first three lines and the abrupt condensed final line. But sometimes political preoccupations steer the language towards the prosaic — alongside the vivid image of phosphate dust looking ‘like a tantrum in a sandbox’, for example, there is the literal, ‘Sorry, Western Sahara, New Zealand needs this’ (‘Phosphate from Western Sahara’). And while sincerity is expressed in several poems (e.g., ‘The Please Stop Killing Us and Destroying Everything That Sustains Us Society’, ‘Father’s Day’), it seems facetious to reformulate Albert Camus’s famous statement about suicide to suggest that the only ‘really serious philosophical problem’ is whether self-driving cars brake for animals (‘The Autonomous Vehicle Research Centre’).
In its recurrently provocative outlook, however, Another Beautiful Day Indoors succeeds in its obvious political aim of consciousness-raising. Poets and other writers often cite instances demonstrating the power of words, and in the notes, Kennedy writes that ‘Phosphate from Western Sahara’ was originally published online in Milly Magazine in November 2020 but was taken down after the editor received numerous threats ‘from anti-Western Sahara liberation trolls’. Kennedy expresses pride in ‘[pissing] off colonialist reactionaries half a world away’, but regrets that the editor was threatened. The cover photograph by Max Oettli shows a man on a train in Switzerland with his jacket covering his head, and the implied reference to the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand is also found in poems like ‘Microplastics in Antarctica’, which challenge the reader directly, ‘Concerned about those embarrassing flakes? / You should be.’ (The poem ‘expresses the literal ‘hope, hope, hope’ that humanity does not discover the eponymous particles, but unfortunately, they were discovered in June 2022).
Kennedy likens environmental activism to ‘going out in high winds / to catch birds’ eggs / blown from nests’ (‘Activism’), and in today’s world of apathy, skepticism, and fake news, activist poetry may be even more challenging. With this collection, though, Kennedy stakes a claim to be a strongly political voice in the global eco-poetry phenomenon.