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P@*ss on Ted Berrigan whilst Kevin Killian and Charlie Parker are like genius kids
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Kevin Killian
Something about those poets and the way they're always dropping each other’s names all over the place. It gives me a queer tremor in the stomach. I picked up a Ted Berrigan book from the library the other day and just about every poem seemed dedicated to one of those New York School of Poets poets. If it wasn't dedicated to Joe Brainard, Jim Carroll, Bill Berkson, or Frank O’Hara then it mentioned them throughout the poems. A particularly good line is thrown down and then "hey, look who just walked in, it's Joe Brainard!" This kind of thing.
Poets by nature tend to be outcasts, or I fancy them that way, so when Berrigan or Brainard have so many famous names inserted you start to feel like they're no longer outcasts but in fact the opposite. The in-crowd. A closed club. Of course its the poetry business have made them the ‘old guard’ and it's TIME has made them a closed club (since they all be dead). Maybe they didn't realize they were building an ‘old guard’ back when they were landing parts in each other’s imaginations, but poets aren't dumb either. They’ve got their strategic streaks. The ego wants a headstone right next to his hero. Poets are shrewd. Handy shapers of history...
Or hell, maybe they're just insecure like the rest of us, looking for a little place to be accepted. Poets NEED each other. Society has turned its back on them. They’ve simply GOT TO STICK TOGETHER.
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Kevin Killian's got a new play going at Small Press Traffic. I'm always coming across slices of his writing here and there. Something will be sent around on the Internet or I’ll open a literary magazine and hear his voice come spilling out. I can't really pin the man down; he appears to wax prolific on whatever zooms through his head. A play will come rambling out based on a conversation riddled with a bunch of pop culture imagery. Or a poem like introduction gets put down about someone else's prose. Pop culture celebs make entrances and exits. A review he writes reads like a poem, but it's about a play. It all swirls around in my head and the forms all slide in and out of each other.
I once read an excerpt where some old jazzman was talking about Charlie Parker. He was explaining how Charlie Parker was so inside the song he'd play the head at the end and the chorus as the head, all while putting two verses in one, and then play a melody from another song during the second chorus and... basically do whatever he wanted. The description sounded like a kid who'd advanced in playing with his action figures to such a state where he could just stick a Han Solo leg into a Batman head socket and make him wax philosophic about space dinosaurs with a broken Lego piece. The imagination can’t be stopped at that point. It just jumps over a rule here or dodges a structure there or ducks under a form to get through and keep going. Anytime I stumble across something Killian’s written I get this image of him as one of these genius kids.
His latest play is (fittingly) called Geyser! Co-created with Wayne Smith, playing at Small Press Traffic, Friday, September 12th at 7:30 pm.
Please arrive early; all seats $10 as a benefit for Small Press Traffic
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