SFBG: Does your drinking Pepsi have anything to do with Kylie?
KK: Well, I used to drink Tab. Then two things happened: they stopped distributing it here in California, or so it seems, and I had a heart attack and I couldn’t drink any caffeine. That’s the thing about Tab: it tasted horrible, but it was filled with caffeine. I had to go to something, so I went to caffeine-free Diet Pepsi. Which was the very drink that made me wonder, “Why on earth are they bothering with that?” So, it’s a matter of…not be careful what you wish for, but be careful what you laugh at.

SFBG: Since the cola wars are over, I was wondering if there was some sort of cachet to Pepsi.
KK: It was Ted Berrigan's favorite drink. I didn't know him, but I saw him a few times, and he guzzled it down. He would get a little antsy if he didn't see a quart of it somewhere nearby.

Sherbet-flavored Kylie

SFBG: There seems to be a kind of split between Action Kylie's first three sections, which are explicitly focused on Kylie as a subject, and the last four, where her relationship to the writing is less obvious.
KK: The book was written roughly chronologically, and I guess my sense of her was so deep — it's part of my identity now — that she's in it equally all the way through. I'm thinking of incidents, circumstances, apparitions of her that maybe aren't visible to you in those later poems.

SFBG: Reading, I focused on the essay in the book’s middle section, “Kylie Evidence,” because it seems to prepare the reader for the different ways she’ll appear in the text. She isn’t mentioned, exactly, in the section titled “In Memory of Gwen Araujo,” but she’s definitely a part of what’s going on within it.
KK: There’s a similar essay in [2001’s] Argento Series, but I put it at the very end. It was in the form of a letter to [the poet] Juliana Spahr, who was one of [Dario] Argento’s fans, and it was basically me telling her what I thought. I liked that at the end of Argento Series. [With Action Kylie], I decided it had to be placed earlier [in the book], maybe to show it’s all about Kylie.

Gwen Araujo

SFBG: "Kylie Evidence" and the huge number of Amazon reviews you've authored collapse a lot of different registers. They're not exactly straight criticism, or uncomplicatedly ironic. There's a strange cacophony in the way they're constructed, going from Wikipedia-style omniscience to something intensely personal. When you identify with Kylie as a "second- or third-rate talent," it's hard not to feel like you're giving yourself short shrift, because that kind of writing does something that's pretty rare to both "creative" writing and journalism or criticism.
KK: It wasn't really a way of fishing for reinforcement, but I realize that's what it does. I had spent years and years writing about Jack Spicer [resulting in the 1998 biography Poet, Be Like God] and seeing his status change from a kind of cult figure into [an element of] the canon. When I started writing Argento Series, few knew Argento; now everybody does. There's something about the situation of the cult figure that's always exasperated me. I don't like it, for some reason. I couldn't figure out why.
When I started working on Kylie Minogue, I was drawn to her because she was a figure who seemed to me, at this one moment in 1998 or 1999, to have absolutely no talent. You know, she had something, but she had no talent, at all, period. And it's the same old story: she is fabulous, it just took me a while to understand how. But it was a great period to be a fan. I think my essay was written in that tone.

SFBG: I became aware of Kylie during her big comeback, around 2002-2003. In “Kylie Evidence,” you mention that at the time the essay was written, the late ‘90s, she was only known by gay men of a certain age and artistic temperament.
KK: I was listening for who was going to become my next muse, you might say. In the space of a week, I overheard people talk about Kylie three or four times. I’d never really heard of her before. One of the people who talked about her was Edmund White. He has AIDS, and he had a string of boyfriends who died, one after another, like dominoes. He told what seemed at the time like a really ludicrous story about a last dance between him and one of these boyfriends -- at a literally underground disco in Rome, they danced the night away to Kylie Minogue and “I Should Be So Lucky.” This must have been right around the time Michael Hutchence died. She was on MTV and they called her “the pint-sized pop princess,” and I was like, “What? She doesn’t look that small.” It was all of these things.

Kevin Killian reading (photo by Alli Warren)

SFBG: Before reading the book, I had found a YouTube video of you reading the long poem that closes the book, “Is It All Over My Face? You Caught Me Love Dancing,” named after the Arthur Russell/Loose Joints disco song. One thing that struck me was the distance between Russell as this canonized, singular, authentic genius and Kylie as someone whose career has basically been an imitation of Madonna. What makes your telling of the Gwen Araujo story [in Action Kylie’s “In Memory of Gwen Araujo”] moving is the way that Gwen’s collaboration with or assimilation of Gwen Stefani — this second-string talent who helps her express her gender identity — mirrors your own relationship to Kylie.
KK: As I was writing the book, we were riding all these different waves of poetry, so some of that is probably in there, too — different modes of poetry. One concern was social practice, and how you fit that into a poem. The murder of Gwen Araujo was something that stuck in my head. We had a friend who was reporting on the case, in the courtroom, and who would come here and tell us what happened, day by day. I didn’t really understand that she had named herself after Gwen Stefani.
As for Arthur Russell, that poem was a little book all by itself. Colter Jacobsen did these pictures for it. I put it in Action Kylie because it seemed to fit in. I was going back to the AIDS war that takes place in Argento Series. It was the oddest thing -- [while] reading an article that Johnny [Ray Huston] wrote about the rediscovery of Arthur Russell in the Bay Guardian, I kept thinking, “This all sounds so familiar, like I know this guy,” but I didn’t recognize him as this master musician. I’m reading along, and find the part where he’s playing the cello for Allen Ginsberg, which is when I was involved with him. Then I get to the part where he died, and I was like “Holy moly!” Until that moment, I had no idea he’d died, and it really struck me. It was a lot about time passing, I guess. I moved to San Francisco right after I broke off with him.
When I was reading that piece by Johnny, I was remembering those songs. We used to dance to them in the discos here in San Francisco. I had no idea that he had anything great happen to him, and that he died.
Now, of course, reading a poetic, condensed version of our little affair is not the same as reading it as prose. The biographer of Russell, Tim Lawrence -- he also wrote a great, massive, scholarly book called Love Saves The Day about the history of the formation of disco in New York – said to me, “Well, to tell you the truth, Kevin, I don’t know anything about poetry, so I don’t understand what you’re saying [in “Is it All Over My Face? You Caught Me Love Dancing’].” He asked, “Are you saying you knew Arthur Russell?” So, he had me write my memories.

Arthur Russell

SFBG: There is a line in that poem that I wanted to ask you about: “My own premature death in June 2004 marked a great loss to contemporary Buddhist art.”
KK: I think I was writing it in June 2004. I thought that Allen [Ginsberg] cursed me and Arthur Russell in a certain way. You know, he put us together, but he kept us apart. There’s a famous artist, Montien Boonma -- he’s kind of like the Paul McCarthy of Thailand, an international artist, but very much a conceptual one. He was married, and the priest who married him and his wife cursed them. He said, “I’ll perform this wedding, but it’s gonna be awful for both of you, unless you promise you’ll never live together,” or never have sex, or something like that. They went ahead and had sex , and all these awful things began happening. His wife was in a hospital room for most of her life, I don’t know what happened to her, but she was very weak and feeble. Then he died, after they had separate hospital rooms. I was very into the tale of Montien Boonma when I was writing the piece. It was kind of a slap at Allen.

SFBG: I hadn’t realized you had been involved with Russell.
KK: Well, he was…what can I say? I didn’t appreciate him. That was the thing, because I was so set on adding a notch to my belt, a famous one, Allen Ginsberg, and he just palmed me off on Arthur, who was kind of a mess in a way. He was very handsome in a certain light, but his skin was just out of control. He really did look like something had happened to him, you’d be walking down the street and people would stare.

SFBG: I’m curious about your writing process, since you suggest a lot of things in the poems and the essay about the nature of your collaboration with Kylie. [The poet] Ariana Reines has criticized excellence in literature as being too generally available, and I think that goes a long way in explaining my own attraction to New Narrative writers. But within that, I wonder what your process is like: I don’t get the sense that you’re the perfectionist that Dennis Cooper is, but you’re also not the kind of one-draft guy that John Ashbery seems to be.
KK: Maybe I’m more of a performer than those two, so I think about how it’s going to sound when I act it out. I also think about how it’s going to look visually on the page. The anagrams in the book were just something I found on the Internet. In “There’s A Dark Secret in Me…,” there’s the old joke about the blonde and the lottery ticket. Those are examples of the detritus of culture that’s always mounting up at your feet. I placed those there sort of like boulders on the seashore so I could find my way home.

Kevin Killian and the poet David Brazil. Photo by John Sakkis

SFBG: You’re obviously comfortable with the TMI-ness, the excessiveness of that junk information – do you think you’re more accustomed to it than other writers?
KK: Because I’m in the New Narrative, it’s really all about hysteria, all those different registers. It’s like I can’t get to the end of the thought -- something else is coming in and I’m going to go there, instead. I try to start out writing a kind of encyclopedia thing, and then I just can’t stop, I’m finding out more and more -- about myself, mostly.

SFBG: I was trying to avoid using the term “New Narrative” because it seems so amorphous.
KK: Each of us has our different way of working with the same material. It was largely about, I guess, bringing up the embarrassing things, like those are really the secrets of life. You’re always going to be red-faced. The things that one wants and one desires aren’t acceptable. Life is this constant negotiation between shame and duration, I suppose. So my themes have always been embarrassment, guilt, social anxiety, and how to get away from those things, just for a moment.
I guess that isn’t true of too many of the other New Narrative writers. They’re all about, say, gossip, the things you’re not supposed to do. It’s not even who you want to have sex with, it’s how you want to live. Those are matters of great anxiety. And even more, how you want to write. When I was young, I thought that writing was a rescue, it could save you, or that it worked as therapy. But that’s not it, that’s not what it’s about. Maybe reading is that way, but writing is always painful and yet maybe easier than reading because it’s silencing. For a moment, you can silence the reader. That’s very tempting, but as leftist writers, we always wanted the reader to come in and have an equal part in what we had to do. They just had to sink to a certain level to meet us there.

SFBG: There’s something about new narrative writing that makes you almost uncomfortably responsible for your ambitions and fantasies.
KK: One reason for the multiplicity of voices in the writing is that feeling -- wanting to include as many different ways of thinking about something, or points of view, as possible. It’s all over my work, and I think it’s why I do a lot of collaborations.

Kevin Killian and photographer Job Piston. Photo by William E. Jones

SFBG: I’ve read about the collaborative novels you wrote in high school, and I wonder if there’s a kind of lineage of poets-collaborating-on-novels that starts with James Schuyler and John Ashbery’s A Nest of Ninnies.
KK: It probably is something like that. We were teens, and our stories were infinitely stupid and druggy. I still have them. As with Arthur Russell, I didn’t find out the friend I wrote them with was dead until years after I stopped seeing him. My book Bedrooms Have Windows (1990) is like a memoir of him, but I changed his name because it was pretty inflammatory. And the day it came out, somebody sent me his obituary. When Dennis says he wrote his books to attract the attention of [his muse of sorts] George Miles, it’s exactly what happened to me. When I found that out, I was like, “What’s the point in all this writing?” That put paid to the idea of writing as rescue. But the stupid stories that we wrote together remain: "Laughs in The Cake," "Love in The Fog," "Lulu at The Ritz."

SFBG: Some of the writers you’re closely associated with, like Dennis, and Dodie Bellamy, have blogs, and you’ve done writing exclusively for the Internet with your Amazon reviews. I was wondering where that Internet-exclusive writing comes from.
KK: I was able to put up my memories of going to Orono [for the Orono Conference] this summer, and using Dodie’s blog was very convenient, because we had all these pictures we could show. It’s a quadrennial conference held in Maine, and this is like the fourth or fifth one I’ve [attended]. Previously, I could write them up and put them on the Poetics listserv, but I’d be stymied because I had all these visual cues that I wanted to show.

SFBG: Your account is something like 20 parts long.
KK: It was incredibly long. It was supposed to be 4,000 words, and it turned out to be 30,000. I just couldn’t stop writing. It took me so long, I had forgotten half of the things I wanted to write about, or forgotten why I wanted to write about them. So it seemed very pointless, as a journalist. It was the death of my journalism, I expect.

SFBG: On the subject of being prolific, do you ever write longhand? Are you an extremely fast typist?
KK: I always think of myself as very slow, I don’t do a lot of writing. I’m always kicking myself for not writing enough. But then, at my age, what is enough? When I had a heart attack, around five years ago, they put me on so many pills that they elevated all my systems and made me constantly happy, so I had no way of writing. I could talk and I could giggle, but I completely gave up on writing. I couldn’t get to the end of a sentence. I was kind of dumb. I had this picture of myself: I had written all these books, I had done all these things, and now it was time for me to rest on my laurels and just be happy. I was almost 50. After about six or eight months, I was beginning to feel like I was a writer who didn’t write about anything, and Dodie said, “Why don’t you write for Amazon?” She said, “Kevin, it’s not like you don’t still have opinions -- just write that, and Amazon will publish it, and you’ll feel like you’re a writer.” And little by little, it became a training space for me to begin writing complete sentences, and then two or three paragraphs — you’ll see [the reviews] get progressively longer and more elaborate. At a certain point I thought, “I can write,” and returned to my other practice of essay writing or critical work, but it took a number of years.

Joe Jonas -- and 1 and 1/16th of his brows

SFBG: I got the impression that it could have been a kind of conceptual project. But some of the lines in those reviews are really killer, such as your description of Joe Jonas’ eyebrows being “like crow feathers—feathers from a 600-pound crow.”
KK: Well, when you do something every day…I had written about a thousand before I realized that was an enormous number. I’d write three or four a day, and sometimes they’d be in themes. I’d pick up the dictionary and see this word, like “midnight” is one I remember. I’d realize I knew a lot about books with “midnight” in the title — or movies, or records — so I would just do forty of them, all about midnight. Maybe here or there, there’d be something that I actually didn’t read, for example, Deaf Women of Canada.

SFBG: That one was really good. So with that in mind, would you ever continue that project on your own blog?
KK: I always feel that I’m in a really privileged place in a way: I think that anything I had to say or wanted to say, I could publish it somewhere. So I never worry about that, and in fact am always in terror that someone will ask me for something and I just won’t have any more left. I’m over-committed in that way. If I wanted to write something, I would put it out there. Dodie’s doing it for entirely different reasons, as far as I can see. For her, it’s a much more personal and political way of putting something out. And I’m not sure what Dennis is doing except possibly a kind of community, new narrative type of thing, where he wants to build a readership one person at a time.

Dodie Bellamy, in Kathy Acker's clothes. Photo by Stephanie Young.

SFBG: Yeah, there’s that Userlands anthology with fiction from his blog’s community.
KK: He’s always so wonderful with all those people, and I would just lose patience. How can he sit there and reply to them and almost always keep his cool?

SFBG: I think I’d question whether or not I was putting them on, but he has a solid balance. I wonder what Kathy Acker would do with that sort of forum?
KK: She would probably have her minions do it for her, so she could just make a graceful appearance now and again. I’m not sure what she would do, but whatever she would do, she would do it 110%.
Dodie has this story about Kathy — her memoir about Kathy Acker hasn’t been published yet — that when the Internet first started, Kathy would come by and say, “I’m on the internet four hours a day.” As though that was some enormous number, and it was, except that within a week or a year, everyone was on the Internet twelve hours a day. But her way of stating this as if it were this extreme, bukkake involvement in the Internet was so Kathy. So I don’t think I really have the time to do my own blog. Someone linked me to a blogroll that my Amazon reviews were on; I’m on many of them now, but the first time I saw them, I was like, “Oh my God, they’ve twigged to me!” I meant to do it kind of under the radar so that the ordinary people looking for Camp Rock would read it, but not people who I knew.

BB: One of the best features on Dennis’ blog is this series where he shares all this documentation about his past lovers. Mark Ewert has an entry.
KK: Dennis always prided himself on being the Sandra Bullock type, where you stay friends with all your old boyfriends. He wasn’t one to just have a blow up or whatever and never see them again.

Cover of Kylie Minogue's Impossible Princess

SFBG: I wanted to ask you about the Kylie lyrics that preface the book, “These are the dreams of an impossible princess.”
KK: It’s an actual LP. It’s called Impossible Princess (Deconstruction, 1987), from when she was going very indie. It’s very much a kind of Tori Amos record. Maybe even weirder than Tori Amos. And when they heard it, all of her fans were like “What? We don’t want to hear this!” It’s very dark, dim, and depressing. It was one of those albums like Chinese Democracy, delayed over and over, and finally it came out on the day that Diana died. People in England and Australia thought she was making some kind of slur on Diana. They thought, “How tasteless -- in her attempt to kind of go punk, she’s gone too far.” So she was put out to pasture pretty quickly, and the only people who supported her were the gay men. The song called “Dreams” that opens Impossible Princess is beautiful. I don’t know what Kylie I prefer, but I think I prefer her in more lighthearted moments than in “Dreams.”
She took the title of Impossible Princess from an English poet-musician named Billy Childish. He had a book of poetry called Poems to Break the Harts [sic] of Impossible Princesses (2004), which she was taken with and borrowed the title. I have a book coming out next summer from City Lights called Impossible Princess. It’s impossible for me to be a princess because I’m a man, beyond everything else -- that kind of futility, that ambition to be something other than what you are, drove her and drove me, I guess. I always wanted to be a bohemian, so I think I managed that pretty good, what do you think? Every year you’re alive, you’ll see some possibilities diminishing behind you, things you’ll never be. The good thing is, new windows do open up, things you never thought you’d want. I never thought I’d write about Kylie Minogue, and what’s worse is that I can’t stop writing about her, either.

THE NEW READING SERIES AT 21 GRAND: KEVIN KILLIAN AND STEPHANIE YOUNG
Sun/14, 6:30 p.m., $5
21 Grand
415 25th St., Oakl.
(510) 444-7263
www.newyipes.blogspot.com