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Erik Kennedy

@erikkennedy.com

1.3K followers 960 following 2.1K posts

Poet behind beloved classics like 'Sick Power Trip' (2025) and 'Another Beautiful Day Indoors' (2022), @thwupbooks.bsky.social. Leading voice of millennial vegan socialist cat-fancying indie pop kids. 📍 Ōtautahi Christchurch http://www.erikkennedy.com

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Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · Jun 20

Not long now, and this big-budget trailer is proof of that.

'Sick Power Trip' hits shelves on 10 July.

teherengawakapress.co.nz/sick-power-t...

Reposted by Erik Kennedy

Kirkdale Bookshop @kirkdalebooks.bsky.social · 1d

Shout out to LK's various translators including George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet, and John Batki

Reposted by Erik Kennedy

Adam McKay @ghostpanther.bsky.social · 4d

On rare occasion there’s an accurate headline about rapid climate warming
and it’s always jarring as hell
and a reminder how much we’re being lied to on a daily basis.

Headline reading “Atlantic current at risk of collapse - plunging U.K. into never ending winter”

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 5d

Especially if it's the colour of Tewkesbury mustard.

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 5d

I have one rule in life: if I see a little 1970s British sports car, I take a picture of it.

Picture of a brownish orange 1973 Morris Roadster, a sports car about as big as an ottoman.

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 6d

Briefly imagining Auden as an Estuary English speaker saying something like /ˈwɪnʔɚ/.

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 6d

Finally, some clarity.

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 6d

They're all wrong, Daniel. I enjoy the fact that the word shares an origin with lapis lazuli, which is also pronounced variously and badly.

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 6d

I say /əˈzjʊə/, which I gather makes me a psycho.

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 6d

I genuinely think there are as many different pronunciations of 'azure' as there are digits of pi.

Reposted by Erik Kennedy

Han VanderHart @hanvanderhart.bsky.social · 8d

“No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. America is having a nervous breakdown.”

Allen Ginsberg

POLITICAL LIFE
Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs or
Independence Day Manifesto

Recent history is the record of a vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind and exterminate all manifestations of that unique part of human sentience, identical in all men, which the individual shares with his Creator. The suppression of contemplative individuality is nearly complete.
The only immediate historical data that we can know and act on are
those fed to our senses through systems of mass communication.
These media are exactly the places where the deepest and most personal sensitivities and confessions of reality are most prohibited, mocked, suppressed.
At the same time there is a crack in the mass consciousness of America-sudden emergence of insight into a vast national subconscious netherworld filled with nerve gases, universal death bombs, malevolent bureaucracies, secret police systems, drugs that open the door to God, ships leaving Earth, unknown chemical terrors, evil dreams at hand.
Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen.
No one is in real control. America is having a nervous breakdown. Poetry is the record of individual insights into the secret soul of the individual and because all individuals are one in the eyes of their creator, into the soul of the world. The world has a soul. America is having a nervous breakdown. San Francisco is one of many places where a few individuals, poets, have had the luck and courage and fate to glimpse something new through the crack in mass consciousness; they have been exposed to some insight into their own nature, the nature of the governments, and the nature of God.

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 8d

'He planned to begin with a poetic, densely allusive speech, which almost no one would understand; then he would make nine hundred pronouncements, each more cryptic than the last.'

Relatable.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Erin Maglaque · Thishereness: Pico in Purgatory

Pico’s Oration contravenes the very idea of human possibility that we think the Renaissance is about – yet we think...

Reposted by Erik Kennedy

Gwen Snyder is undead @gwensnyder.bsky.social · 9d

Mr Pope

worm @rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 9d

really enjoying all the people trying to explain the bible to the pope today

Pope Leo XIV
Today, more than ever, we must return to the heart, the center of feeling and emotion, the locus of freedom. Though it includes reason, the heart transcends and transforms it. Only by returning to the heart can we undergo a true ecological conversion that transforms our personal

Austin
I reject this whole heartedly. What you fail to see Mr Pope, the Bible says

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 9d

Bridgegate on steroids.

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 10d

Thank you for enabling my questionable habits.

Reposted by Erik Kennedy

Nick Sturm @nicksturm.bsky.social · 10d

It's the end of The Best American Poetry.

I wrote about the forty-year anthology project, poetry’s place in Big Five publishing, and editor David Lehman's culture wars vision of American verse.

defector.com/good-riddanc...

Good Riddance To ‘The Best American Poetry’ | Defector

When David Lehman, a poet then working as a book critic for Newsweek, proposed the project for The Best American Poetry anthology, he was searching for a national platform. His first anthology project...

Reposted by Erik Kennedy

Sassy Little Hobbit @sassypolitico.bsky.social · 10d

Our current relationship with America is so out of sync with public opinion it’s bordering on bizarre. I know there’s a level of tech billionaire capture playing a role, but it’s wacko hour tbqh apnews.com/article/kash...

FBI boss Kash Patel gave New Zealand officials 3D-printed guns illegal to possess under local laws

On a visit to New Zealand, FBI Director Kash Patel gave the country’s police and spy bosses gifts of inoperable pistols that were illegal to possess under local gun laws and had to be destroyed.

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 10d

'Racist tribute act' seems fair.

Reposted by Erik Kennedy

Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social · 10d

quiet bat people, are you out there

Picture of Keir Starmer at conference in front of a red background. Yellow subtitles saying painting a fence, running the raffle, cutting the half-time orange

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 11d

Ugh.

Reposted by Erik Kennedy

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 11d

i am constantly going to car shows in random central virginia towns and hanging out with elderly white guys and their 1957 ford thunderbirds and i should make that a bigger part of my pundit persona. “ah, i commune with the Volk around their sacred objects”

Reposted by Erik Kennedy

Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 11d

Some interdimensional portals I found on walks yesterday and today.

A hedge portal at Montacute, Somerset (aka Wolf Hall)

A mysterious circular portal in a granite wall

A classic tunnelled footpath portal

A particularly attractive ruined barn portal

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 14d

A predictably dreadful decision, but that doesn't make it hurt less.

Reposted by Erik Kennedy

David Cormack @davidcormack.bsky.social · 14d

This just gets memory holed

Quick summary of 28 African countries boycotting the 1976 Olympics because NZ was allowed to go after maintaining sporting ties with South Africa.

First mass boycott of the Olympics, because of New Zealand.

Reposted by Erik Kennedy

London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 14d

‘There is no getting around the weirdness. We don’t really know what it is or what it was for.’

@tomlukejohnson.bsky.social on the Pearl Manuscript, which includes the only copy of ‘Gawain and the Green Knight’: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Tom Johnson · Supereffable: Mysteries of the Pearl Manuscript

Any book made by hand is unique, but the Pearl Manuscript’s claim to uniqueness is unparalleled: the manuscript...

Erik Kennedy @erikkennedy.com · 14d

Shameful.