(Kevin Killian in 1979 Photo: Michael Johnson)

Kevin Killian, member of the New Narrative movement and the co-founder of Poets Theater, passed away June 15th, 2019. Killian published over a dozen books across a variety of genres including novels, memoirs, poetry collections, edited works, and plays. He was given the 2010 Lambda Literary Award under best gay erotic fiction for his novel Impossible Princess (2009). He is survived by his wife and fellow writer, Dodie Bellamy.

A queer man himself, Killian dedicated himself to preserving the work and ephemera of gay poet Jack Spicer, co-editing a collection of his poems, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer and co-authoring his biography, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance. Despite his magnetic personality and cult-like following known as the “Spicer Circle”, the young poet, who died at the age of 40, wrote outside of both the mainstream literary culture and counter-culture of San Francisco. In their collection, Killian and his co-editor, Peter Gizzi, preserved the voice of a man who could have fallen into obscurity otherwise.

Desire erupts from this collection of single poems (which Spicer called his “one-night stands”), published poems, prose-like letters, and serial poems. Killian’s own writings simultaneously swirls with pleasure as it stings with the pain of regret, shame, and grief. Shaped by the New Narrative movement’s transgressive poetics, the late poet confronted sexuality directly in his writing, not shying away from even the most raunchy of details.

Remembered by friends as brilliant, honest, humorous, and generous, Killian nevertheless wondered if the intimate, perverse picture he painted of himself in his memoir Fascination (Semiotext(e), 2018) cast him as “the worst person in the world”. This willingness to embrace the gritty details of a life lived in the sexed-up, booze-ridden gay underworld of 1970s Long Island and San Francisco is what made Killian gravitational, though. His kind, generous spirit and writing will be deeply missed at Wesleyan University Press and throughout the literary world.

(Kevin Killian, as remembered on Twitter)

“Writing was always going to be the solution to the age-old reading problem of, there’s a gap in one’s shelf of books, and you just can’t find the missing link, you must write it yourself.”

— Kevin Killian, in an interview with Rob McLennan