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.