The Brooklyn Rail

The legend goes that when Kevin Killian was seven and met Shirley Temple, he was so nervous that he vomited on her shoes, no doubt a metaphor for what would become his life of both star obsession and writerly irreverence. Padam Padam is a posthumous collection of five poetry volumes: Argento Series, Action Kylie, Tweaky Village, Tony Greene Era, and Elements, the poetic output of a writer committed to no singular form, and who was as deeply ingrained in pop culture as he was committed to documenting unlit corners of queer life. Killian died in 2019.

Padam Padam is named after a 2023 song by Kylie Minogue, whose life Killian knew in morbid detail. “Still the US knows nothing of Kylie at all,” he laments in the poem “Kylie Evidence.” He notes that “Madonna and Kylie make an almost religious pair, a diptych of Darwinian selection poked through the tight gaze of funk culture,” which is no less of a fan fic than “hello, hi, Walt Whitman, sleeping soundly with Rock Hudson, / with your long cruel hair wrapped right round his pole” from elsewhere in the volume.

Killian was a star in his own right. He was a co-founder of the New Narrative movement, a group of writers, mostly based in San Francisco, whose work was experimental, fragmented, and rooted in an effervescent now. For members including Robert Glück, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Camille Roy, and Dodie Bellamy—Killian’s wife and artistic collaborator—the abject is glorious and there’s no need to clean Shirley Temple’s shoes. “Can a body be a commons?” Killian asks in “Link,” seemingly summarizing the movement in six words.

Killian was a serial curator. With Bellamy, he edited the anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997. With Peter Gizzi, he edited My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, who was part of the San Francisco Renaissance, a precursor to the Beats. Killian also co-founded the San Francisco Poets Theater and wrote over thirty plays for the collective. It’s ironic that he excludes all of this in “The Gifts of San Francisco,” when enumerating what the city has given to the world, eschewing literary achievements for martinis and the popsicle.

Bits of song drift in and out of Padam Padam, always transformed. “Killian steals outrageously from another to produce a totally different creative result,” writes Kay Gabriel in the introduction. “Think of it as an experiment in collective language.” From inventing words like “brainstakingly” to discovering that “corrupt males” is an anagram for Marcel Proust, Killian’s wordplay was the vehicle he rode through various social scenes, his doorway into the metadata of language where he was most at home. “He read all his poems twice, thinking, / ‘they did not hear them the first time’,” Killian writes in “The Flowering Face,” a reminder that in serial poetry, there can be no wasted stanzas.

Killian wrote from the front lines of the AIDS epidemic, where he witnessed the incalculable loss of so many friends and peers. In Argento Series, he reimagines the horror films of Dario Argento as analogous to the physical and mental ravages of the disease. The dedications to Killian’s poems read both like a litany of the dead and a joyful resurrection. We feel the sexual longing in “Probability zero that I would live / and he, Tim, his student ID the cover on his book, / would study death before I got to do him,” and the twisted humor in “I don’t have / many T cells left, but I used to have 8”. Killian’s interest in bodily horror is vividly cinematic, with poems in multiple volumes bathed in the glow of late-night spooky TV.

In his essay “Tony Greene Era,” he celebrates the work of a painter who embraced an idea that Killian himself practiced: decadence as a form of political activism. “All of our great artists had an attitude towards the market that was, to one degree or another, a big fuck you,” he writes. “They would make their artwork out of rags and biscuits if they liked, they would make things so ugly and so temporary they would fall apart when you brought them into the light of day.”

In Elements, we hear less from the art connoisseur and more from the boy from Long Island, the budding flâneur. Halloween in Smithtown is a bright spot, but the sting of disappointing his father lingers. In “Tungsten,” Killian writes about being devastated when a student drops out of one of the college classes he taught. “My mother whispers to me in the darkness that that girl did not hate me. She only despised me.”

The four hundred pages of Padam Padam, carefully curated by Evan Kennedy and Jason Morris, are but a smattering of Kevin Killian’s life work, yet they’re ample enough to show his brilliant, hungry mind develop over the decades, spinning up new universes, sometimes enjambed but always brainy and sexual. The quietest parts speak the loudest. Here is “Jealous Roommate”:

“And why do you write?” she said to me.
She’s everyone from A to Z.
“I write,” I said, “because it’s fun,
Because, like Jell-O,
I have been invented.”