12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lorne Daniel

Lorne Daniel is a Canadian poet and non-fiction writer. He has been deeply engaged in the literary community, including the emergence of a Canadian prairie poetry scene in the 1970s. He has published four books of poetry, edited anthologies and literary journals, and written freelance journalism. His work has been published in dozens of anthologies, journals, newspapers and magazines in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Lorne lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən people in Victoria, BC.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I was in second year of college, just discovering creative writing, when a prof started a college press and invited me to do a book. It was a work of juvenilia – quite bad. But it did get me thinking that it was possible to write and publish. That I could be a writer. I published a bunch in my early adult years, then turned to teaching and family and earning a livelihood. My new book comes after many years of no book publications, so in some ways it was like starting over.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Poetry spoke to me, to my emotions and internal conversation. I read fiction and non-fiction, and have written both, but poetry maintained its place at the centre. When I start some notes or a draft of something, I think my default is usually poetry.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I still usually draft with pen and ink, and there are many, many, scribbles, half-full journals, and folders of notes on my work space. A very few poems have emerged in close to their final form. Almost all go through multiple rewrites and edits. The writing can happen quickly, but I do go long periods without writing much at all.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I do both. I have created collections by finding poems with overlapping themes, and clustering them together. On one project (forthcoming, I hope), there’s a concept and scope right from the get-go.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

In the years that I am actively writing, I have also typically been an active participant in readings – as an organizer, audience member, and reader. Like many writers, I am essentially introverted, but do want to share my work, and enjoy reading. That said, I’m not the ‘pop up in a crowded bar and launch into a poem’ type.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I am not a theorist at heart. I have strong opinions and ideals about society and our culture but most of my work falls into conversational and lyric forms. “I lean toward clarity,” past U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón said to me in a workshop I was fortunate to take with her some years ago. That resonates with me. I want my work to be relatively accessible to everyday readers.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Writers exist to give creative expression to the human experience. That’s a very broad role. Some writers are going to give voice to that expression in more pointed, political, and culturally focused ways. Others not. We don’t need to define what writers should be doing; they will do it.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential. I didn’t always realize how helpful an editor could be, but I do now.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

When something broke or went missing, my mother had an expression, “It’s just a thing.” There’s a lot of wisdom in that. Life is not our things.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I’ve gone through stages of writing both. In middle age, I wrote a lot of non-fiction in the form of essays, newspaper columns, and book reviews. I quite enjoyed that. Its appeal is that a larger proportion of the community regularly reads non-fiction. You can reach a lot of people.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t have a routine. My most productive writing is when I can get away from home for a retreat, whether that’s a few days of cat-sitting for friends, or a longer stay. It doesn’t have to be far away from home, but I sure work better when I step away from perceived tasks, chores and responsibilities. In my early years, I attended a number of retreats through writers’ organizations. More recently, I tend to just book a getaway spot and go on my own.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Reading and walking, walking and reading.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lilac blooms (my mother had a lilac), and the dusty aroma of cut hay on the prairies.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Nature always inspires, but it also makes me feel that I’ll never create a work that matches what nature itself can do. Which is to be expected. I always find visual art stimulating, and I find the nuances of cities can generate creative responses. I am interested in how people gather, move, and live in community.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

In recent years, poets who have made lasting impressions on me include Ada Limón, Jane Hirshfield and Jack Gilbert. E.B. White was a clear favourite in the years when I was writing short non-fiction. I have also been intrigued by the writing of map maker David Thompson for decades – his Narrative is a compelling story, and William E. Moreau’s compilations of versions of Thompson’s work are fascinating to me.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Stay healthy, stay active (mentally, physically), keep engaging with writers and readers. So, a continuation of where I’m at now.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I think I might have enjoyed architecture, though a good friend who is an architect would no doubt tell me that the fantasy does not fit the reality.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Reading led me to scribble, and my scribbles found some readers. It was a progression, less than a conscious decision.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Jane Hirshfield’s The Asking, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A prose-poem collection focused on place, in west-central Alberta.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Pierre Joris, Poasis II: Selected Poems 2000-2024

 

This afternoon Dante
will be ex-
pelled from Florence —
a good thing as how could he
have written so well
on the far-away imaginary ex-
ile of the comically divine
realms had he not known
what it meant to walk
over a cold January day’s
ground frost, clod-
breaking, heart beating,
from one city to another
— to come to
this: that exile
is but the next step you take
the unknown there
where your foot comes
down
next, in
heaven or on earth
exile is when you can still
lift a foot
exile is when you are not
yet dead.

Despite having caught a reading by the late award-winning Luxembourgish-American poet, essayist and translator Pierre Joris (1946-2025), a translator well known for his work on Paul Celan, and his wife, Nicole Peyrafitte, years ago in New Orleans during a jaunt south that Stephen Brockwell and I did (circa 2011 or so), the first title of his own writing I’ve properly attended is the newly-published Poasis II: Selected Poems 2000-2024 (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2025). Published as a companion volume to his Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999 (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), the author biography of this new volume does provide that “Pierre Joris competed the selection for Poasis II before his passing on February 26, 2025, in Brooklyn, New York.” Normally I would complain a bit when hearing a writer assembled their own selected or collected poems, but there would be few capable of doing the work required for such an imposing volume, by such a writer and translator as Pierre Joris (although an introduction might have been nice, as part of my usual selected/collected complaint; was there no-one else around that could have offered a tribute of sorts, and a bit of context to Joris’ work?). The two hundred pages-plus of Poasis II: Selected Poems 2000-2024 gathers sections of his poetry, as the acknowledgments offers, “sometimes revised,” from an array of books and chapbook produced within that particular window, including Permanent Diaspora (Duration Press, 2003), The Rothenberg Variations (Wild Honey Press, 2004), learn the shadow (unit4art, 2012), The Gulf (between you and me) (The Crossing, 2013), Meditations on the Stations of Mansur al-Hallaj (Chax Press, 2013), Barzakh: Poems 2000-2012 (Black Widow Press, 2014), The Book of U / Le livres des cormorans, with Nicole Peyrafitte (Editions Simoncini, 2017), Fox-trails, -tales & -trots: Poems & Proses (Black Fountain Press, 2020) and Interglacial Narrows (ContraMundumPress, 2023).

There’s a kind of intellectual flourish and play within these works, comparable to the work of the late San Francisco-expat Vancouver poet Robin Blaser (1925-2009) or of American poet Rosmarie Waldrop; a way of incorporating and interweaving contemporary and classical references amid multiple languages, musical scores, translations and explorations through critical thinking and poetic form. Robert Kroetsch once offered literature as a conversation, and here it is. Through Blaser, Waldrop and Joris, a poetics, one might say, of companions and conversations, offering a wealth of responses, translations and interactions between languages, between literatures; a poetics rich with collaborators. I would only hope someone that far more familiar with his ongoing work might provide a fleshier review than my scant notes here.

Reading Edmond Jabès

Here, the end of the word. of the book, of chance. 

Desert!
            Drop that dice. It is useless.

Here, the end of the game, of resemblance.
            The infinite, by the interpretation of its letters
            Denies the end.

Here, the end cannot be denied. It is infinite. 

Here is not the place
            Not even the trace.

Here is sand.

 

Sam Creely, INVENTORYS

 

CANTING

A thin sympathetic reservoir of the had. See two figures

in crinoline advancing from animism carrying slanted

parasols. Felt surface of colloquy, teflon, polymer,

paste, put your hush finger over my mouth and tell me

time past is the only thing endless

I was curious to catch a copy of Toronto-based American poet Sam Creely’s full-length debut, INVENTORYS (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2025), a curious book-length suite constructed via a sextet of sections set as “six acts”—“Inventorys,” “Excursion,” “Rush of,” “Pendulant,” “Slow Rosebud” and “Tend”—attending rhythm, sound, a condensed and vibrant language and visual play. “O tiose how the limbs go at it,” Creely writes, “you know the sense of straining through wire / the thin searching oh lord of the proscenium / in lip too close, so seeable // What do we learn we learn to notice / in the nape of the neck, a remnant / in the small of the back, pre-crisis [.]” As Jon Wagner’s blurb for the collection offers, Creely’s exploration of the “shipwreck of the 18^th century Spanish colonial frigate El Nuevo Constante along with its monetized piece of cochineal is an almost too perfect metaphor for the flotsam of an age of synthetic rationality appearing as a stain upon the waters, returned from currency to ephemera and consigned to the mud of its own universalist logic.”

Composed in a variety of poem-shapes and stretches, the assembled poems are delicate and detailed, offering a patchwork of linguistic inventory and fantastic density across points and pinpoints, an accumulation of boundless speech and memory. “Baptisa Second pilot knew he / could be the moon when askd,” Creely writes, as part of the section-sequence “Rush of,” “how have you slept / sound opened / his trade language mouth / to speak achieved only grease / & two goatskins [.]” Both breathless and precise, Creely’s INVENTORYS is a plural, almost polyvocal study across a single idea, writing into and through a space of approach, inventory and detail. Through Creely, phrases and lines pile atop each other, providing layers of accumulated meaning in remarkable ways. There are almost elements that echo from Lisa Robertson’s The Weather (Vancouver BC: New Star, 2001) or J.R. Carpenter’s Le plaisir de la côte /The Pleasure of the Coast (Pamenar Press, 2023 [see my review of such here] for what appears to be a repurposed and/or found language (I say this without evidence, of course), gymnastically mangled in the most beautiful of arcane patterns, providing an electric density that does read as startlingly original.

Love imprecise reproductions

won thresh vanish mackinaw

  First own then own own

  Vacant Boatswain 

  Classical rational harrow

  Lacuna become wheat 

from creel en throstle frame

            fathom in half retrospect 

            carryed by sounds

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Terra Oliveira

Terra Oliveira is the author of Itinerant Songs (July 2025), and the founding editor of Recenter Press. A finalist in the 2024 Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry, her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Bamboo Ridge, The Common, Puerto del Sol, Protean Magazine, and more. Her poetry and illustration collection, An Old Blue Light, won the Where Are You Press Poetry Contest in 2015, and she has been awarded international residencies at The Schoolhouse at Mutianyu at the Great Wall of China, and elsewhere. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, her family lineages migrated from the Hawaiian Islands, the Azores, Southern China, Guadalajara, and throughout Europe. Her work is an extension of her core practices and beliefs: in recovery, community, pilgrimage and retreat, and peoples' movements globally.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I self-published my first book, in passing., in May 2015. Each poem was accompanied by illustrative interpretations of each poem, hand drawn in white lines against a stark black background. Since then, I have published several books: (more than) dust. (a photo book I funded on Kickstarter in 2016), The Calming (Where Are You Press, 2016), a poetry and illustration book which I republished as An Old Blue Light (2017) when I changed my name, Processes: A Meditation (2017, micropoetry and illustration), And Still To Sleep (2018, poetry, prose, and 35mm film photography), The Road Is Long & Beautiful (2022, 35mm film photography), and now, Itinerant Songs (July 2025). Itinerant Songs is my first book of exclusively poems. My voice has changed and developed a lot since my first books—my political perspective, emotional and psychological maturity, so many things influenced by life-experience, political organizing, and recovery especially.

It’s hard to say that my life changed much outwardly from my first book, as it only sold a small amount of copies and I didn’t really know what I was doing in terms of marketing and distribution. I’ve since made my first book unavailable for purchase (name change, etc), and I ended up consolidating my favorite poems from in passing. into An Old Blue Light when I re-released it. But, publishing in passing. did teach me a lot about book design and story arcs, and it gave me the confidence to keep making books, tabling at zine fests, and eventually founding my own small press, Recenter Press.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Like many poets I’ve met, I’ve been writing poetry since childhood. My middle school friends and I would frequently write poems and song lyrics together. Recently, when I was cleaning out my dad’s storage unit, I came across one of my homework assignments from elementary school, where I wrote a letter to a children’s author saying that “I wish I was a poet,” asserting that “I’m going to be an author when I grow up.” I suppose a part of me always knew which direction I wanted to go.

I also came of age during Tumblr’s peak, where I’d share my own poems and reblog others’ work. I experimented a lot with my writing at the time, often very publicly. I would say that was my first real introduction to contemporary poetry, and then through DIY publishing, not through academia in any way. I was not particularly interested in writing fiction, and still don’t feel called to it, but I am interested in personal essays and would eventually like to write more long-form pieces in the genre.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I started working on Itinerant Songs in 2018, and just published it this year if that’s any indication. I write poems in spurts, sometimes going months without writing, and sometimes writing many poems in a short period of time. I usually edit them quite a bit from their first drafts; my poems go through a lot of reshaping and chipping away. It’s a lot like kneading bread.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Usually, a line will come to me and I’ll go from there. I don’t often sit down with nothing and try to conjure up a poem. Something comes, and I’ll see what else it has to say. Or from a prompt, or reading someone else’s poem, which is part of why I think it’s so important for poets to read other poets. I want to always be in conversation with others, whether explicitly or not.

I write standalone poems without initially thinking of how they would fit into a book or relate to my other poems. I do start with compiling them all in a single Google Doc, and when I eventually think I could have enough to fit into a book, I’ll select my favorites and start organizing them in InDesign or Canva and try to put the similarly-themed poems near each other. Over time, I continue to edit, cut, add, and shape a narrative arc with the poems I have. The book ends up revealing itself to me along the way.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

While I was writing Itinerant Songs, I mostly took a hiatus from doing public readings. At the time, I wasn’t interested in reading my new work while directing people to my earlier books. Instead, I put a lot of my energy into submitting to literary magazines and compiling my book. Now that Itinerant Songs is released, poetry readings are a huge part of sharing and marketing my book. Marketing online exclusively is not only a slog, but it’s not as effective or as fun as bringing our poems into a room full of engaged listeners. We sell our books, build connections and community, and support other poets along the way. I feel a great deal of stress and pressure leading up to readings, and fears of failure or of no one showing up, but once I’m there living it, I relax and really enjoy them.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’m interested in writing from a working class, anti-imperialist lens that also communicates the sanctity of things: of water, of land, of spirit, and of people. I don’t think I have answers as much as I just hope to write personal testimonies as a witness and as a systemic critique. I think we need to keep asking ourselves in our writing and in our lives: how do we cope? Where do we find hope, and in what? How do we build solidarity? How do we fight back? How do we reclaim our lives? Where do we go from here?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

A writer has the responsibility to tell the truth and to be a mirror. I don’t think every writer should be writing about every issue either, especially topics they know little about or have only seen fragments of on social media. There’s this tendency where people and writers may feel the need to have a hot take or write a think piece about every cultural and political moment, whereas not everyone needs to be a news outlet (not that many news outlets are really doing a great job at “truth telling”). What I mean is, writers should consider how much we know about a topic before publicly speaking to it, what our motivations are for writing, and whose agenda our writing is furthering. Our writing should serve our own and others’ betterment in some capacity, whether that’s helping our society as a whole or helping us see and know ourselves more clearly.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I am embarrassed to admit this, but I don’t often work with an outside editor for my poetry or personal essays. The one time I had a book published by another publisher, my editor had no editing suggestions when I gave them my final draft. I don’t know if it’s because I already edited my poems to death or what. There was actually one occasion where I had several poets give feedback on a writing sample I put together, and the feedback I received was really helpful. Editors help us push ourselves and develop our ideas more, so I would like to work with experienced editors more often in the future. I think it can be difficult because I’m somewhat stubborn and hard-headed about my ideas, but keeping an open mind to others’ suggestions has helped to improve my writing, other creative practices, and many areas of my life in general.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Slogans I’ve heard in recovery communities to be honest: keep an open mind, one day at a time, live and let live. I need to be reminded of them daily.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

When I was writing Itinerant Songs, and working full-time as a bookstore manager for the last two years of writing it, I’d spend hours after work or Saturday mornings or Sunday nights sitting at cafes and working on my poems. I don’t have a daily writing practice, but I try to do something that furthers my writing most days each week: actually engaging in the writing itself, submitting to poetry journals, promoting my book, booking readings, applying to residencies, anything related to the project of writing and getting it out there in the world. I’m obnoxiously organized and keep spreadsheets and Google Keep lists of tasks I need to do for my writing.

As far as how my mornings begin, now that I’m not traditionally employed (which is a struggle of its own), my morning routine is in a bit of a flux. My ideal morning routine would start with prayer, reading, journaling, and a simple breakfast. I am not a creative or technical writer in the mornings—that is the time I usually reserve for writing personal reflections, things I’m grateful for, things I’m powerless over. Lately, I might compulsively start my morning by opening my emails or reading some article online, needing to unglue myself, then writing to-do lists for the day. Then I’ll typically take a long walk before sitting at a cafe or library and working on book-related tasks. The best way for me to start a morning is by not taking in any information on the internet and clearing my head, but that’s a habit I’ve struggled to get away from. Mornings are such a cherished time for me, and something I’m always working on.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I’ll stop trying to write or edit and focus on reading others’ writing. Writers are literary citizens, and my favorite way to participate in the literary community is by reading, responding to, and sharing others’ work. Especially books from contemporary poets published by small, independent presses. That usually sparks something in me.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Miso soup. Steam from a rice cooker. Bay water breezes.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I am absolutely influenced by my time writing in nature. While I don’t do it often, some of my most grounded poems came from time in communion with the natural environment. My poems Here and Bon Tempe Lake in my book, Itinerant Songs, are some examples. My writing is really shaped by experience, by work, and by things I’ve read elsewhere.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Some of my favorite poets right now are: Lucille Clifton, Marie Howe, Gina Myers, Marion Bell, Lora Mathis, Ryan Eckes, Amy Berkowitz. All of the authors I publish through Recenter Press. People who write about Hawai’i and anti-imperialism. 12 step literature and recovery-oriented books, which are what I read the most. Spiritual texts.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

So many things. Walk the Camino Francés and Camino Primitivo. Write a memoir or some other creative nonfiction. Really learn hula. Run an event space / bookshop / residency of some kind down the road. Have my own home that can also be a project and creative expression. Have a family. Get an MFA.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Vocation has continued to be a big question for me. While I consider writing and my creative work to be my “career,” it has not been financially sustainable for me yet. Even as a publisher, I’ve always needed to have an additional job, which informs a lot of my writing too. I’ve been a bookstore manager, community organizer, educator and camp counselor, farmer and farmer’s market vendor, filmmaker, house cleaner, dog walker, among other odd jobs. I am currently considering and looking for what my next job will be, and I haven’t known yet what occupation calls out to me. I don’t know if I even want writing to be my full-time job, or if I pursue an MFA, what I’d even do for work afterwards. I have a lot of skills and interests, and am quite hard-working, so it’s always a matter of where I could meaningfully put that energy and what will sustain my livelihood. In the interim, after I finish my initial book launch, I’ve applied to do a four-month-long apprenticeship and residency at a Zen center, and I’m waiting to hear back from a few writers' residencies I’ve applied to next year. Service and spirituality are an important part of occupation to me, so I’m hoping to use that time to reflect on my values and their relationship with work. What’s most important to me is that my work aligns with a “Right Livelihood,” and that can look a lot of different ways.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Obsession lol? Needing a way to organize my thoughts, feelings, and ideas, and then to use it as a tool to have people see—whether that’s just to be seen, or have others see something I’m seeing.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I loved Gina Myers’ newest poetry book, Works & Days, which was just released from the Philadelphia-based Radiator Press. I also recently read Amy Berkowitz’ Tender Points, from Nightboat Books, which was a brilliant testament to chronic pain and its relationship to trauma. I couldn’t recommend those books enough, both for their craft and ideological clarity.

As far as film, for someone that has a B.A. in Cinema (really it's for documentary film production), I am the opposite of a film buff. I love cheesy, unpretentious TV and being entertained. I rarely watch movies, but I love a good series binge. My favorite show I watched recently was Outlander; I loved the time-travel elements mixed in with Scottish and anti-colonial history. Now I’m watching Sex and the City for the first time, which I love watching as a single 30-something writer who was having no luck with dating to the point where I took a one-year dating break. Now I get to watch their drama and feel relieved I’m not doing all that right now.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Mostly, just trying to get my book out there. I’ve been doing a ton of poetry readings around the Bay Area, and it’s very gratifying to finally share these poems that I’ve been working for so long on. Otherwise, I don’t have a new project in the works yet. I’ve been working on my physical health, and trying to make progress in some recovery programs I’m in. I’m grateful for the opportunity to share Itinerant Songs, to devote a great deal of time to promoting it, and to take the pressure off of producing something new. I would not call it a break at all, but a time to give this new book my all and to read others’ work. I’ve also recently opened the call for submissions again for Issue Six of the Recenter Press Poetry Journal, so I’m excited to curate another issue this winter and share all those new works.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Kevin Killian, Padam Padam: Collected Poems, eds. Evan Kennedy and Jason Norris, with an Introduction by Kay Gabriel

 

That Certain Something

I had an epiphany, Mama,
it was going to be awesome
a trio of white, green and orange clouds
shaped like snakes kind of leapt up
into the top of the sky
spelling out my name
in the colors of Ireland or India
Was it real, Mama?
Or was it this Philip K. Dick illusion—that I
was in love with him but it wasn’t really me?
Who had this epiphany
standing at the edge of the cornfield
with my ka-tet,
feet a-tingle, and Irish habitrails spelling my name
in letters that would soar one thousand feet high
—was it memories implanted in my brain
I wanted, once, years ago
but now I’d rip them out like Spike the chimp
that made him wince
rather than hurt another human being?
Tell me, Mama, that certain
something I felt like a rock in my chest

Further to their array of essential collected volumes that New York publisher Nightboat Books has produced over the past few years—volumes such as San Francisco poet David Melnick’s (1938-2022) Nice: Collected Poems, eds. Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander, Jeffrey Jullich & Ron Silliman (2023) [see my review of such here], Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader, edited by Jamie Townsend with an afterword by Alysia Abbott (2019) [see my review of such here] and On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays (2022) by the American poet and critic Douglas Crase [see my review of such here]—emerges Padam Padam: Collected Poems, eds. Evan Kennedy [see my review of Kennedy's City Lights poetry title here] and Jason Norris, with an Introduction by Kay Gabriel (New York NY: 2025), an essential new volume by the prolific and beloved late San Francisco poet, writer and editor Kevin Killian (1952-2019). For those unaware, Killian was a central figure in Bay Area poetics and prose, emerging in the 1970s as one of the New Narrative writers, a period of activity acknowledged through the anthology Killian co-edited with his partner, Dodie Bellamy [I wrote on her work not long ago here], the five hundred-plus pages of Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997 (Nightboat Books, 2017) [see my review of such here], an assemblage acknowledging a movement, as the book described, “fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle [.]” Killian’s was a poetics that was openly queer and centred around a blend of community and pop culture, writing Jack Spicer, Karl Malden, Ted Berrigan and Kylie Minogue with equal seriousness, equal weight; equal verve and gestural delight. There were no levels for those Killian adored: he was all in, and for an enormous amount of film references, pop figures and those in his immediate community. As he wrote to open the piece “Story of Lincoln,” one of two Abraham Lincoln poems collected here, originally produced as part of his Tweaky Village (Wonder Books, 2014):

And what right have you to comment on my choosing to love the person I set my heart on? Merely because you and Ross have gone on record as stating that heterosexuality is not of interest to the human community? I was the law partner of the man you think so little of, and he, Lincoln, deserves the respect you would give to any other black-clad human of a species, be he gay or straight! And you in your high-toned two-colour surrey of the month with the lampshade fringe boggling at five miles an hour—you do not know what went down on those long prairie nights in the world’s largest bed in the world’s largest log cabin next in Springfield?

It breaks the heart that much more to know of Killian’s love for theatre, the performative gesture and serious play, and be aware how much he would have adored, for example, Cole Escola’s play, Oh, Mary!, that opened last summer on Broadway. There is always so much joy, such celebration, throughout Killian’s work, even across dark stretches, a next generation Frank O’Hara, exploding across multiple points simultaneously, offering a freedom that 1960s New York could only dream of. Oh, Kevin Killian, we love you please get up.

Where Has the Love Gone?
written in honor of Brian Pera and Kylie Minogue 

for all that I’m feeling kind of—fragile
or blue, like my sash, wove in
Rotterdam when I was Dutch doll 

Binging and purging on holiday sweets in
Rotterdam—when I was your holiday girl
If I remember correctly
Anyway I’m right as rain now, but where did the love go?
Nobody seems to know in any of the cages, I just hear these words
    passed back and forth, through the bars: 

“Pssstt—where has the love gone?”
Even the card round my neck, tied with human hair, seems to whisper
    of a
Rapture once known, now evanescent
A love that couldn’t exist when I spoke and talked about
    you, and I did you, baby

Kay Gabriel’s extensive introduction [see my review of Gabriel’s most recent poetry title here] offers some really interesting context to Killian and his work, writing how: “[Jack] Spicer’s emphasis on the community that makes poetry function found a welcome audience in the Bay Area’s New Narrative moment, which Killian enthusiastically participated in nearly from its start, and whose writers collectively and individually emphasize the role of the social in artistic production. Killian and Dodie Bellamy in their introduction to Writers Who Love Too Much, their anthology of New Narrative, especially compare New Narrative’s ‘writing prompted … by community’ to Spicer’s ‘Poetry and Magic’ workshop, ‘when [Spicer] was writing books in which every poem was written for a different person he knew.’” While I have been making my way as well through the absolute delight that is his Selected Amazon Reviews (Semiotext(e), 2024), a book I highly recommend as well, it does make me wonder if there might be a selected or collected Kevin Killiam prose collection at some point down the road, especially since he published far more as a prose writer than a poet. Beyond what was assembled in the New Narrative anthology (and the Jack Spicer biography he co-wrote), I’ve not read much in the way of Killian’s prose, so am unaware of there exists that same level of absolute play as is displayed in other elements of his writing, although I can’t imagine how not. Later in the same introduction, Gabriel offers:

But I don’t mean to accuse Killian of all this weighty stuff, like revealing truth and transforming reality, without also crediting him for authoring a fabulous, permissive body of work, charming, filthy and smarmy at turns, with its reachable milk enemas and its devilish twists on Hölderlin’s “Pallaksch.” It’s as if he’s always stopping to say hey to some bright gems of cultural refuse, and figuring out how he can set it into his language palace. Thank God we get to live there forever, too. Like Brecht and Kurt Weill said about their Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogonny, Kevin Killian is fun. He’s more fun than you or I can bear, and we have to, have to, keep bearing his wit.