Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

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

2021; Eastern Michigan University; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jnt.2021.0013

1549-0815

Adam Mitts,

Short Stories in Global Literature

Elegiac Citationality in Kevin Killian's "The Inn of the Red Leaf" Adam Mitts (bio) 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 [End Page 269] Argento Series, a collection of poems written in response to the AIDS crisis. In Argento Series, Killian's commitment to the affectively difficult and negative aspects of grief and his resistance to the emotional closure of the traditional elegy is rooted in the overwhelming communal loss of the AIDS crisis as well as in capitalism's relentless commodification of affect. Through a queer relation to devalued commodities such as pop songs and horror films, Killian critiques commodity culture while salvaging affect and lyric poetry from their enclosure by the commodity form. This paper is divided into two parts: first, an analysis of Killian's refusal of elegiac closure, followed by a close reading of "The Inn of the Red Leaf" to demonstrate his citational approach to elegiac form. Argento Series is an ekphrastic work using the Italian giallo horror films of Dario Argento as a medium through which to write elegy in the face of inexpressible loss. A style of horror film that became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, giallo films are noted for their stylized violence, labyrinthine plots, and outlandish use of color. Argento's vocabulary of tropes—blood, amnesia, serial killers, vomit, etc.—provides a set of images and themes that allow Killian to access language under the pressure of painful and traumatic memories while also serving to refract the poetic 'I' and displace the burden of affect from the sentimental demands of the traditional elegy. Besides being a way to access memories that might otherwise be inaccessible, ekphrasis arguably shields those memories from affective commodification by displacing one set of tropes through another and resisting commodification by critically engaging a commodity. Killian's elegies are also densely citational in terms of allusion, appropriation, naming, and engagement with poetic form, particularly the forms of the poets whom he is mourning. Because of his work as a historian and scholar of the Bay Area queer poetic community, the inventory of poetic forms and voices in Argento Series archives a communal and literary history that was endangered by AIDS. Such poetic reanimation of the dead alongside the ekphrastic displacement of memory allow Killian to write elegy in a way that provides a space for personal and communal mourning while avoiding elegiac closure. Lyrically and epiphanically, Killian's method here resolves the intractable loss of the beloved, leading to a renewed appreciation of the ongoingness of a world whose beauty was so perfectly demonstrated by the beloved's existence. In her 1997 study of...