Action Kylie

by Kevin Killian

Kylie Minogue, more than muse, is K. K.'s aesthetic m.o., his ammo. Around her name and image, he circulates the particles of his own uncanny idiom, which is unlike anything in contemporary American poetry. Killian works every instrument in the band; he sneaks up behind meaning, and makes it sing. Somehow, in the midst of defamiliarization, Killian's voice remains companionable and comforting. Action Kylie is a book I will turn to when I want to remember that literature can regenerate authenticity as well as renege it. Killian plays with multiple rhetorics and codes, all in the pursuit of his own school of Action Poetry, in which I wish quickly to enroll. --Wayne Koestenbaum

Genres: Poetry

126 pages, ebook

First published August 1, 2008

About the author

Kevin Killian was an American poet, author, and playwright of primarily LGBT literature. He is also a highly regarded editor. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009. His novel, Impossible Princess, won the 2010 Lambda Literary Award as the best gay erotic fiction work of 2009. Killian is also co-founder of the Poets Theater, an influential poetry, stage, and performance group based in San Francisco.

He is married to Dodie Bellamy.

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I got Action Kylie in the mail, I was prepared for entertaining, emotionally complex poetry (having read Killian's work for a while, and having recently published some recent poems in Cannot Exist). I wasn't prepared for the incredible variety, elegance, formal beauty and overwhelmingly moving nature of the book. I mean, I knew it would be good, but I didn't expect to have the wind knocked out of me, to end up exhausted and with tears in my eyes, more thoroughly unable to put it down than I'd been with a book of poems in some time. All this coming from a book centered (very loosely at times, or most of the time) around Kylie Minogue, a pop singer I remember from the '80s and didn't know (or care) had had a comeback. In his brief essay about Minogue's career and what she means to him, Killian writes that she appeals to him as a "second-rate talent" who does as much as she can with that, knowing the tricks that will make it work--and he makes this description of himself as well. It reminded me of an excellent pianist friend saying that his favorite composers were the second-rate ones--by which he meant brilliant writers like Debussy, "second-rate" only in the sense that he wasn't in the German-Austrian legacy of composition. Killian's statement only makes sense to me in this way. From elegies for murdered transsexuals to opaque lyrics to personist directness to almost classical pieces to a beautiful take on Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman" (a translation part homophonic and part literal, with interferences, replacements and reformalizations by the author--the free, unsystematic character of the piece is a sign of Killian's talent), this is a wonderful book, one I'm looking forward to living with and reading repeatedly.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

<3 KK! <3

Formally, as the cover suggests, KK goes about trying to imagine Kylie from every vantage point. She becomes ever more elusive as she becomes ever more clear; and such is that sort of identity KK leaves up for grabs. If we are our pop idols and our pop idols are us, that shit is dialectic,man. And that's what we like.

[Erik Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fifteen stitches across my face,
one for every man that hurt me.
Fifteen apparitions I have seen—the worse, a coat upon a coat hanger.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
and not those things that they were emblems of. Is it
all over? My face feels scarred,
my teeth stretched across Botox and bandages.

[Jak Merriman · Rating 5 out of 5]

god he’s just a fucking genius

[Wendy Trevino · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm going to have to/to want to read this again immediately.

Favorites: Fly, Hymn, Travel in Light Years, Kylie Evidence (a short essay on Killian Minogue), The Tongue Twisters/Flowers and Money, The Cats (the entire section), American Idol, An Audience with Kylie Minogue, Hi! I'm the Green Fairy, Ballad of the Little Boy Who Began to Identify as a Pop Girl, Aflutter

[Ronald Palmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kevin Killian manages to be funny in his poems which is a revelation in itself. I love reading this book aloud in bed. He comes alive in the air around me. Kevin is a great teacher of the genuine within poetry and his passion flows out from all directions without pretentiousness or pre-tension. He's fun, bold, contemporary and instantly classic.

[Julia]

Ah, MLA book sale. How I do love you.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the first section of this book - and the middle Kylie-centric stuff. Some of the other parts lost momentum for me.

[Inverted · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not overwhelmed, but there were moments of sheer entertainment. I wish there were more Kylie poems. They were quite refreshing.