Kevin Killian was obsessed with stars. Not in a metaphysical sense, like the grand lineage of poets that went before him, but the celebrity kind. Some were A-listers – he kept a vast database on Julia Roberts – and some more obscure. In 2000, taken by the work of cult literary sensation JT LeRoy, and confusion about their identity, Killian gave public readings of their work in San Francisco, where he had lived for 20 years after moving from New York. He would also turn unknown poets into local celebrities, hosting poetry events and making rapturous introductions to crowds that were occasionally outnumbered by the people on stage. “Anyone he admired was an A-lister,” says poet and friend, Evan Kennedy, “especially unknown poets. He’d enthuse about someone, and I’d say ‘Who?’ Kevin engaged the Bay Area poetry scene like Warhol did his Factory – but unlike Warhol, it wasn’t centred around him or his work.”
Killian – a figure in San Francisco’s New Narrative movement, alongside writers such as Kathy Acker and Robert Glück – saved his biggest celebrity obsession, however, for Kylie Minogue. She ran through his work like letters in a stick of rock. In 2008, he published Action Kylie, a poetry collection that included works named after Kylie songs (Slow, Spinning Around, Your Disco Needs You), and more abstract scenarios, such as the lovelorn An Audience with Kylie Minogue, in which lyrics from Fever intertwine with the mundanity of Love Hearts sweets. A year later, in 2009, Killian published Impossible Princess, an award-winning collection of gay erotic fiction named after Kylie’s misunderstood 1997 opus. She’d crop up elsewhere too, reflecting Killian’s bonafides as a proper fan. Tightrope, from 2014’s Tweaky Village collection, is named after a Kylie B-side, and highlights how “All her best songs saved as B-sides or just leaked on to the internet, where they live on as fan favourites”.
These poems and more appear in Padam Padam, a new collection of Killian’s work that pays obvious homage to Kylie’s 2023 hit of the same name. Released four years after Killian died of cancer aged 66, it was chosen as the perfect title by Kennedy and fellow poet Jason Morris, who would hear the song everywhere while they were editing the book. For most Americans, Kylie had slipped off the radar after her 2001 hit Can’t Get You Out of My Head, but “Kevin wouldn’t have called Padam Padam a comeback,” says Kennedy – “though it was to everyone dancing in San Francisco that summer.”
An acclaimed editor and playwright as well as a poet, whom transgressive writer Dennis Cooper called “the greatest unsung genius in contemporary American literature”, Killian’s devotion to Kylie initially baffled Kennedy and Morris. “I couldn’t see why Kevin would spend his talents on her,” says Kennedy. But slowly he started to see a connection in the way both Kylie and Killian moved through their careers, and how they interacted with others. “Maybe the reason that his obsession was Kylie and not, say, Madonna or Simone Weil, is the same reason that Kevin settled in San Francisco, as opposed to New York,” he says. “Kylie is scrappier and less polished. Her glamour is more achievable. Kylie reaches out to her fans.”
Morris initially saw Kylie, and Killian’s parallel obsession with writing Amazon product reviews (later compiled in another posthumous book, 2024’s Selected Amazon Reviews), as a curious use of the “deeply charismatic” writer’s time. But Killian seemed to revel in the New Narrative movement’s collapsing of high and low culture, with his love for Kylie speaking to his identity as a gay man. (Killian’s “sexuality was practically off the queer end of the chart,” wrote his wife of 34 years, Dodie Bellamy, in 2000 – they had a fluid approach to sexuality).
“In the North American media market, to love Kylie, you probably also have to be gay,” says writer Kay Gabriel, who provides Padam Padam’s introduction. “In Kevin’s exhaustive detailing of Kylie’s career and collaborators, there’s a sense that this enthusiasm will yield something like a hidden truth. Maybe what he calls the ‘empty, spooky sigh at the heart’ of her work. All that said, he clearly revered enthusiasm on its own – he had a deep ecumenical respect for the adoring relationship that anybody has with their particular diva.”
In her introduction, Gabriel homes in on Killian’s use of “a third term between [his poetry] and its object”, a playful style she feels Killian, who disliked being over-intellectualised, would say he used simply because it’s fun. Whether writing about the Aids crisis in 1997 via the prism of the horror films of Dario Argento, or exploring the human condition in drag as Kylie, this third term defined his best work. This framework, Gabriel says, was a way for Killian and his readers to engage with trickier experiences “by bouncing our ideas off of something else, something good to think with, something with a lot of captivating material”. A move a certain Padam Padam hitmaker, whose career has been about masking reality via the shiny world of pop, would surely recognise.
Padam Padam: The Collected Poems is out on 18 December published by Nightboat Books, £17.99
