The Poetry of Janet Kenny

“One day in London, years ago, when I was practicing a song in the hearing of a musical old friend from my native country he said, ‘Why don’t you just ignore all these bloody singing teachers and sing the way you used to sing in New Zealand? You were better then.’ He was right in many ways. How could I explain to him that I had needed to immerse myself in the orthodoxies of my art in order to measure my worth against established international standards? And yet I knew that I had lost something valuable. Perhaps a spontaneity and freshness and even the verve and impetus that came from not knowing what should have inhibited me? Young artists are driven by fearless curiosity and daring. The discovery of form is like the discovery of sex. It’s better if mother has left the room.”—Janet Kenny

Book Review

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Editor’s Note: I discovered Janet Kenny’s poetry on the medium which I persist in calling Facebook, not Meta. And because I myself write formal poetry (on those rare occasions when I still write poetry), Kenny’s work got my attention immediately. (In fact, the first poem of hers I came across was the last one you will read below, inspired by a certain President of these not-very-now-united states.) I am old, and Kenny is even older, but here we are, still, both of us, separated by some 9,000 miles of mostly ocean, but “corresponding,” in so many of the ways that we both feel are important. If you are new to Kenny and her writing, I, and Hubris, are pleased to introduce you. Meanwhile, from very far away, Janet, I want to tell you that you’re a marvel!

PENDLETON South Carolina—(Hubris)—June 2025—Born a New Zealand banker’s daughter in 1936, Janet Kenny (née Stevens) was expected to embark upon a career more serious than painting and singing, which came naturally to her. Growing up, Kenny had an aunt who was a poet. “None of the rest of my family appreciated her but, in a way, she was quite famous,” she says. Kenny defied her family by going to art school, where she met her life companion, whose deep understanding of music and the visual arts would sustain her for 66 years. She gained confidence and experience through the support of the music department at her university, where she gave the first performance outside America of composer Lester Trimble’s “Four Fragments from the Canterbury Tales.”

Janet and her husband Nelson soon left the Antipodes for London where, at 29, Kenny turned up on the wrong day for an audition at Glyndebourne Opera House: hoping for a job in the chorus, she was, instead, hired as a soloist and cast, first, as the third boy in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte.” (The great African-American tenor George Shirley was a wonderful Prince Tamino.) Thus began a happy career with the young singer performing across Britain alongside singers she had long idolized. Kenny says her most spectacular experience came at the Belfast Festival working closely with the great Italian baritone Rolando Panerai, wonderful tenor Ugo Benelli, and conductor Walter Susskind in Rossini’s “La Cenerentola,” in which she played one of the two awful sisters.

But the singer fell ill with anorexia as a result of an expectation, then, that women singers always remain thin and she eventually gave up her stage career. Nelson, simultaneously, was offered a job in Sydney. There, Kenny worked in the anti-nuclear movement and jointly compiled, wrote, and edited a book about the nuclear industry (Beyond Chernobyl: Women Respond), published by Envirobook in 1993. She returned to poetry in Australia, but says her love and passion for music continue to inspire her writing. “I think it’s the same thing in a way,” she says. “Sound and rhythm matter a great deal.”

In an interview with Michael R. Burch, editor of Hypertexts, Kenny says, “One day in London, years ago, when I was practicing a song in the hearing of a musical old friend from my native country he said, ‘Why don’t you just ignore all these bloody singing teachers and sing the way you used to sing in New Zealand? You were better then.’ He was right in many ways. How could I explain to him that I had needed to immerse myself in the orthodoxies of my art in order to measure my worth against established international standards? And yet I knew that I had lost something valuable. Perhaps a spontaneity and freshness and even the verve and impetus that came from not knowing what should have inhibited me? Young artists are driven by fearless curiosity and daring. The discovery of form is like the discovery of sex. It’s better if mother has left the room.”

Kenny’s poems have appeared widely in print and online journals, including Avatar, The Chimaera, Folly, 14 by 14, Iambs & Trochees, The Literary Review, Mi Poesias, The Guardian, The Spectator, The New Formalist, Barefoot Muse, The Raintown Review, The Shit Creek Review, Snakeskin, Lavender Review, Soundzine, The Susquehanna Quarterly, Umbrella, and Victorian Violet Press. Her work is also featured in the collections The Book of Hope and Filled With Breath: 30 sonnets by 30 poets. Kenny collaborated on an anthology of bird poems, Passing Through, with Jerry H. Jenkins, and has received three Pushcart nominations. (Her books This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press) and Whistling in the Dark  (Kelsay Books) may be ordered by clicking on the hyperlinked titles.)

Funeral Pyre
By Janet Kenny

I made a bonfire of my mother,
piled the anecdotes she told me
on the pyre. The ancient malice
and the anger. Every other
hurt and callous.
Higher, higher! Burnt the prison
that she did not dare abandon.
All the loyalties that hold me
in the coffin made by women.

Take my love and keep it, knowing,
nothing can prevent our going.

Fly now little captive! Quickly,
they will drag you by your ankles,
weigh you down with guilt and duty,
tending siblings who are sickly,
wearing out your Scottish beauty.
Did you marry to escape them
only to repeat the pattern?
How your children’s presence rankles,
as your pent up furies shape them.

If by chance, we met at random
there would be no proper meeting.
Nothing there for either woman.
Let us cry ‘nil desperandum’.
Our unhappiness is human.
Inside books your life was vivid,
and you dreamed around your kitchen
filling mouths forever eating
as your hope of leaving withered.

Presbyterian farmers’ daughters
can’t out-hare tradition’s tortoise.

Your unhappiness pervaded
every room and every second.
Horrified, I saw my future.
Feminism came unaided
with environment and nurture.
No Ostrovsky family vision
would consume the life you gave me.
I was tougher than you reckoned,
faced with female circumcision.

(Originally published by Kelsay Books in Whistling in the Dark.)

Ten Netsukes for an Old New Zealand Lady
By Janet Kenny

i
Old people are
self-contained like
netsukes, arms around
memories. They know the
value of despised things in
their loneliness for vanished
certainties. Old silvered wooden
fences, earth smell of a garden,
familiar shoes shaped like a loved
foot, music no longer respected,
paintings, no longer admired,
food no longer fashionable,
old herbs and trellises of
beans in back yards
with parsley.

ii
Grass fresh mown
by hand and sweat,
polished tables and
scrubbed benches,
baking dish soaked
to wash tomorrow,
cruet on table, salt
with everything,
always a pudding.
Wireless and a book
after lunch on
Sundays or a drive
snail’s pace to see
the cherry blossoms
and stare at others
doing the same.

iii
Remember that
woman who lived
with a husband, not hers?
I saw her in the butcher’s and
she wasn’t wearing a ring.
Something about her, you
can always tell, the walk
that gives ‘them’
away.

iv
My father
knew the Latin names
of plants. I like a nice show
in the garden. Bitter wind kills
everything but sweet-william
and hydrangeas, dahlias grow
well, I remember the kowhai
bushes heavy with tuis in
Hawke’s Bay when I
was young. All day
on knees weeding
and remembering.

v
My long auburn
plaits made Maori
children touch them
and once fetching water
at the well my uncle said
I was the image of his
Eileen when they were
courting. I never feel
beautiful now.
Never.

vi
Baking is
expected and
pastries, cakes,
pikelets and scones
are the duty of
respectable
housewives.
Mine,
though I say it myself,
are better
than my mother’s.
Such a shame
they are
eaten.

vii
My little
brother was
shot by a sniper in
Florence.
My true baby
and nothing seems
worth while since
I knew he would
never return. Shot
the last day of the war.
How can I grieve with
this family who are
town people, so
different from
country, and
were not in
my childhood?

viii
I am bitter
with disappointment.
War and money are all
there is. My daughter is
foreign. She’s like her, my
mother-in-law, that old cat
ruined my life with her
condescension, his
sister, school-marm,
gave her ideas.
I want her to marry
a doctor and have a
normal life.

ix
Country skills
un-needed lose value
in towns and needed skills
are absent. Conversation
about . . . about what? What
are they saying? Politics
that would shock Father.
Unions! And the drink!
Always. Money down
the drain. People!
Och people!

x
My son’s wife
wouldn’t have me
in her house.
We planned
to buy a big house to
share. She smiles,
but
I know it was her,
not him.
We looked at houses
together. She liked
the wrong houses.
I couldn’t live with
his mother, but
that was different.
So here I am
alone with
town people.
Alone.

(Originally published in Umbrella. Author’s Note: “My interest in sculpture drew me to the fetal shapes of Japanese carved netsukes which remind New Zealanders of Maori greenstone Tikis. They are often powerful sculptures despite their minute proportions. Italians say that people like my late mother are molto chiuso (very closed).  My mother’s life was disciplined and contained. Her unexpressed anger and pride made me think of the similar tensions which lurk beneath the calm resolved forms of the best Japanese netsukes. You could say this is a love poem to my mother.”)

Illusion
By Janet Kenny

I wish to wash away in blue washed light.
See how the seagulls fade while still in sight,
one moment near, then gone. They disappear
and yet we know they’re there. The sky is clear
but white turns blue. The empty view declares
a sleight of eye. They vanish unawares.
So life betrays our sense of permanence.
We shift to past while in the present tense.

(Originally published by Kelsay Books in Whistling in the Dark.)

Hard
By Janet Kenny

A wall of ice can turn to water,
wood can burn or break and splinter,
minds and hearts immured in winter
harbour hate and give no quarter.

Kangaroo
By Janet Kenny

i
I do believe in fairies when you prick
your ears and through the grass
you look to see if I am something that might kick
or kill, then sensing not, you let it pass
and bend to graze again inside the thick
coppice by the road with all the class
of animals at home. I am the hick
who gawps behind my camera lens. Your quick
perception of my place is clear as glass.
You turn your tail and slowly scratch your arse.

ii
So delicate, Australian bush.
All filtered light and sudden glare.
Fine elegance of angle. Hush—
a click, a swoosh, then nothing there.

iii
We came with metal cars and cut
the forests down to make our roads.
We drove out more than we drove in,
obliterated habitat
and sewed koalas from your skin.

iv
We put you on our coat of arms
and grilled you in smart restaurants.
We took possession of your charms
and used you in our boozy songs.
The apeman rules marsupial
but cannot herd your lightning flock.
You come and go, mercurial
immune to fence and gate and lock.

v
I’ve seen you bounding over fields
and clearing fences like a dart—
design so perfect it disarms
the meanest money-grubbing heart.
You live at night and venture out
when darkness shields you from attack.
Your tribe can meet and move about,
grey smudges in the sheltering black.
But men in trucks with dazzling lights
make sport of massacre and hunt
your transfixed throng. They train gunsights
and mow you down, their feelings blunt
with mob excitement. Carnage rules
as corpses pile and wounded roos
escape to die—the work of fools
who have no genuine excuse.

vi
You’re dog-food for the beast we own,
koala toy to please a child,
a pair of shoes we buy in Rome,
so we abuse the free and wild.

vii
The people who were here before
would kill one kangaroo for food.
No sense in killing any more
was their prevailing attitude.

viii
Vanishing species, you and I,
as humans gobble up the earth.
The lot of us are going to die
consumed by our expanding birth.
For now, you have this sunlit spot
and I can have my camera shot.

(Originally published by The Raintown Review and by Kelsay Books in Whistling in the Dark.)

On the Edge
By Janet Kenny

The pier extended out to sea,
a wooden prayer to human skill.
Beneath it instability
reminded us that sea can kill.
A wash of light transformed the scene.
Horizon dazzled into one
immeasurable blue and green
all subjugated by the sun.

A child who wore a tutu danced
beside the water, shook her head
and told the waves to stop, advanced
to us then danced away instead.
No logic matters in a space
where elements become confused.
The heavy fishermen lent grace
to every implement they used.

Wood, weathered like the people there,
withstood the seasons and survived
well-toughened in the open air,
intractable and uncontrived.
The start of sea, the end of land
where limbic systems half recall
the time we crawled up on the sand
to claim the earth and take it all.

Orang-utan
By Janet Kenny

If my arms were gangly like theirs, I’d swing in the canopy,
lope in elliptical attitudes, changing my shape,
study and try to avoid unavoidable entropy,
learn about edible fruits from a scholarly ape.
I’d leap in arboreal loops through the tangled immensity
and dangle through chlorophyll rays in a luminous sky
Below me the forest would glow with a jade-like intensity;
I’d dance over darkness, unfurl with the orchids and fly.

(Originally published by Quadrant.)

Out There
By Janet Kenny

One moment light, then dark — no power.
The suburb stopped in sullen shock,
without a warning, for a block
all motors died for half an hour.
Twittering heedless through the trees,
two small marauding ringtail possums
cheerfully sought for shoots and blossoms
unaware of our unease.
Little marsupials, monkey-tailed,
hooked on branches and extended
hands for flowers which were intended
for such as these, then up they sailed
as though no gravity existed;
over canopies they skittered,
barely touching as they littered
poo and petals till they misted
into darkness where they vanished,
leaving me to wait for light
and when it came, too harsh, too bright,
I longed for what my world had banished.

(Originally published by The Chimaera. To hear Kenny read two of her poems, click here.)

Last Dance
By Janet Kenny

Old lovers promenade the beach,
bare feet, hands held, they pace the last
of what is theirs. No need for speech,
They walk united by their past.

They pass, united by the walk
of other pairs of lovers, some
still young, engaged in lovers’ talk,
not yet aware that love is dumb.

The tide goes out, the tide comes back,
as one and one and one retrace
their steps to hunt for what they lack
but never find. Their other face.

Broken quatrains of faltering feet
search for a time they cannot beat.

(Originally published by The Chimaera.)

Seen From Above
By Janet Kenny

driving to Brisbane

Seen from above, our little yellow car
winding up hilly country gravel roads,
shiny and silly among rough trucks with loads,
must appear inappropriate and bizarre.
Is it, perhaps, the very thing we are?

Lovely, the blend of dust and leaf and wood,
balanced by birdsong and the tractor’s roar;
action and stillness as our spirits soar,
racing the sun before dark shadows could.
Everything, Pangloss said, is for our good.

Blinded by sunset, tree-flashed, into night,
darkness and moonlight up the motorway,
silvered into the city near the bay
sparkling like fireflies flirting with our sight,
over the great black river framed by light.

Seen from above we blend and disappear.
So many stories. Listen, the laughter bursts,
and ricochets off stone walls. Each spirit thirsts
after the gift of somewhere free from fear.
Seen from above this fragile life is dear.

(Originally published by Barefoot Muse.)

Butterflies
By Janet Kenny

Today is a day of butterflies but how can I
write of such things for people in cities, caught
in human closeness. If I ever thought
that they could care that all the air of my
garden is crowded with light uplifting
colour and whiteness, wafting, shifting,
I only need to remember the traffic clanking
and think of the feet on the pavement spanking
clipping and shuffling, and voices merging,
decibels surging and iron screeching,
thumping and thudding and Muzak reaching
into the buildings where lovers are lunching,
people are buying and selling, munching
something in paper, and rushing and crossing,
pissing and bossing and talking and meeting:
I and my butterflies are retreating.
Once I was part of the clutter and clatter.
I mixed and I struggled and joined the chatter
and oh, how I loved it, the smells and the fashions,
the colour and movement, the joy and passion
Here with the butterflies in my garden
I bless the living and ask their pardon.

(Originally published by The Lavender Review.)

To a Dying Rat
Janet Kenny

Rat, I did not lay the bait
that’s brought you to this parlous state.
Your dulling eyes encounter mine
and I recall the famous line:
“Wee, sleekit, cowrin’, tim’rous beastie”
and grieve with Burns, but then at least he
saved the mouse, whereas I watch
your death, old rat, and cannot scotch
the human habits that determine
which are pets and which are vermin.

(Originally published by The Susquehanna Quarterly.)

Paddling Song
By Janet Kenny

Tidal we are and always were, poor newts
walking on land, but slithering home to rest
sad salamander bodies. Wet salutes,
cool as the sea-splashed kisses we love best.
We are the instrument but not the song,
sea ragas blown from shell and bone and spray,
tapped on a coral tabla, swept along,
driven by solar winds to far away.
Everyone is the same beside the sea.
Nothing but light and fractured form that drifts,
bleached into brightness, anonymity,
vagrant and lost in parallactic shifts.

(Originally published by The Raintown Review.)

Articulated
By Janet Kenny

The thought that leapt into my head
when I was told of nuclear war
was: All grasshoppers will be dead.

And then it was as if I saw
their jigsaw, zigzag, tensile limbs
meccano-jointed, ready for

Olympic heights in leafy gyms.
Darwinian prodigies that spring
in arcs as freedom’s metonyms

for absolutely anything
unfettered where the will finds ways
to levitate somehow, to cling

on any apex where its gaze
looks further to more distant peaks.
And so the seeker never stays,

but leaves the stage to one who speaks
for those articulations lost
to grounded military cliques

who hate, and hurl their one riposte.
Annihilation, endless night,
to win the fight, despite the cost.

(Originally published by The Flea.)

Savage Morning
By Janet Kenny

Ice-sharp, the probing winter sun
stabs down its light to start the day,
and spider installations spun
by night ignite a flash display.

A spangled drongo, frantic, flies
through glinting trees, a streak of blue
emotion, topped by ruby eyes
in search of something cruel to do.

A snake with open belly, dead
beside asparagus, reminds
the gardener that the potting shed
hides more surprises than she finds.

Who killed the snake? It was not I
who said that everything must die.

(Originally published by Kelsay Books in Whistling in the Dark.)

Broken
By Janet Kenny

The pig smashed the music
and turned off the sun.
As the pig couldn’t use it
nor should anyone.

O remember the time when the violins played
and the meadows were blooming and we, unafraid
dared to splash in the river and lie in the grass.
But they’re mowing the field now and scattering glass.

The mother in China,
the daughter in Spain,
must learn to design a
new habit again.

The athletes are anxious, the singers are dumb,
the children are fractious and calling for Mum.
Now Dad is in futures and selling his shares
and his foreign computers are yesterday’s wares.

Who let the pig loose
in the garden? and why
have we cooked our own goose?
I await a reply.

(“Broken” was originally published on Facebook. Concerning the trigger for creating it, Kenny writes: “The only event was the world economy being interfered with by the folly of one awful man. One ignorant bully can dismantle the world.”)

To order Elizabeth Boleman-Herring’s memoir and/or her erotic novel, click on the book covers below: