Elegiac Citationality in Kevin Killian's "The Inn of the Red Leaf"

Abstract

On June 15, 2019, the poetry community received the heartbreaking news that Kevin Killian had passed away. Shortly after, there was an immense public outpouring of grief, as members of the community reminisced about their friendships with Killian, his generosity as a mentor to younger writers, and his virtuosic gifts as a poet and a writer of fiction. In some ways, these public acts of mourning by the community reflect one of the most significant aspects of Killian’s work: his engagement with the place of loss in the composition of communities and the role that public acts of mourning play in not only remembering the dead but also in archiving communal histories. The preservation of queer and literary histories is characteristic of much of Killian’s writing, from his 1988 memoir Bedrooms Have Windows and its memorialization of a pre-AIDS era of gay sexuality to his work with Lew Ellingham on a biography of Jack Spicer, a founding member of the Berkeley Renaissance, an influential coterie of gay, postwar Bay area poets which included Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser. As a member of the New Narrative movement, Killian combines community gossip and personal disclosure with formal experimentation and self-reflexivity, and uses a camp style of pastiche, appropriation, and a leveling of the high/low binary that is as indebted to the drag show as it is to the art gallery. That Killian’s death produced a flood of memorialization is poignant and fitting, given how central the role of loss in the construction of communal memory was to his work, especially in his 2001 book