Kevin Killian (right) and Peter Gizzi, 2004. Image courtesy of Peter Gizzi.
It’s hard to know where to start to say something in the wake of Kevin Killian’s passing. I’ve spent the last week broken up knowing he was in the ICU and then failing and then eventually passing on out of our immediate surround. I’ve been sleepless and sad and silent and have spent the past days looking at wonderful photos and taking in the hundreds of truly loving and heartfelt tributes posted on Facebook and elsewhere. All of it cutting deep. And the photos of him and Dodie giving me the most pause, to see their total love and happiness in all of their photos together. What a singular stunning story of devotion and art and love they shared. Something wasn’t entirely real for Kevin until he could share it with Dodie. I’ve been watching, with gut laughter and intermittent sobbing, videos of him reading and talking. I’ve been rereading his interviews with complete astonishment at the casual way he summoned such wide knowledge and combined it with his instinctual intelligence.
The photo I share above is from a brighter moment, it’s from the week in 2004 when we first went through the five Spicer archive boxes that Robin Blaser had sent to the Bancroft. We were so filled with mind-blowing joy at the many treasures that were to be found and were almost breathless as one of us would hold up a sheet and say, “Oh my god! The unfinished letter to Lorca about sounds” or, “Holy Shit! There is an entirely new and longer text to the ‘Oliver Charming’ notebooks,” and it went on like this moment after moment for a full week. We have both said to each other, more than once, that it was one of the best weeks of our lives. How fortunate to share a deep love and regard for a writer. How lucky, in the moment of discovery, to share this affinity with someone I loved. This is fun: Kevin being Kevin, he invited many people to come by to witness the gold we were unearthing. At one point there were six or seven younger people standing around in awe. He transformed the stodgy hush hush of the Bancroft into a happy hour! He made magic and fun out of his life. A major part of what it was for me all these years working in this queer archive compiling My Vocabulary Did This to Me, and helping out with other documents to come, was always to be sharing it with Kevin; it will always be this way. And all the myriad emails and squibs over the years about this or that piece of gossip, lore, or discovery in the ongoing Spicer archive. Kevin’s search never ceased, he was always discovering new things and sharing them. He was willing to share the fruits of his rigorous research and scholarship with anyone, i.e., everyone. He was the most unselfish and unproprietorial person I knew. His generosity and thoughtfulness in every aspect of his life were legion. And his hunger and curiosity were a constant source of wonderment. He was voracious and giving. With his passing we lose an incalculable knowledge of the San Francisco scene and its histories.
What we do have is his writing and that will now be his great legacy. There wasn’t a genre that he didn’t engage—and engage with sheer, uncanny, off-handed originality. For me his harrowing Argento Series, published by Krupskaya in 2001, took its rightful place among the great queer works of SF poetries, along with John Wieners’s Hotel Wentley Poems and Spicer’s Language. But it has been my feeling for some time that not until his Amazon reviews (he wrote close to 2,700) are selected and edited and placed in a proper volume, will we be able to take the full measure of this epochal masterwork. The best of his “imaginary reviews” make a sly and informal but absolutely scathing intervention into the complacent nature of our role in consumer culture in this age of commercialized governing. There is nothing like them: hilarious, caustic, culturally illuminating, informed, disarming, class awake, off-putting, fictive, documentary, and seemingly cast-off. Every time I heard him read one the room was crying with uncomfortable, self-aware laughter at the broken system in which we engage every day. Beckett said that “the task of the artist is to find a form to accommodate the mess.” Kevin certainly found it in this project, and all of it unpretentious and breezy, and written in a language Marianne Moore called “plain American which cats and dogs can read.” I can imagine Kevin Killian, this superlative and brilliant human, one of our important and intrepid interlocutors of literature and culture, writing these documents, creating this new exploratory form out of the gigantism of overpowering commerce, not at a writers’ colony or on sabbatical leave, but at his desk at a 9-to-5 job at Able Cleaning Services where he worked as an executive secretary for the majority of his life. There is so much more to say and we will have to say it over the coming years as his work is gathered into new editions.
I remember when we first in met in 1991 at Jessica Grimm’s apartment for a house reading by Lisa Robertson. He was lovely and introduced me to everyone there. He proposed we have lunch the next day to talk Spicer. I was looking for unpublished work for my little magazine o-blek. Besides Spicer, we mostly talked about classic cinema, trying to best each other with names of starlets and B-movie cast lists. At some point he looked at me and said: “Are you sure you aren’t gay?” I wasn’t sure if he was hitting on me or putting me on. I’m still not sure. He was the best and always fun to be around. He wasn’t simply the true keeper of the flame of SF poetries, he was the flame. He welcomed countless youth into this story year after year after year his whole life. It will never be the same without him. He was my brother in Spicer and I am blessed to have known him, to have loved him, to have learned from him (and will continue to learn from him), and to have had him in my life all these years.
June 2019