Circumventing ogr2ogr for the first conversion, I've found a unix tool that will allow me to do this (https://github.com/mapbox/csv2geojson)
csv2geojson -lat "latitude" -lon "longitude" input.csv > intermediatefile.geojson
I use a constant name for the output file so it gets just overwritten a bunch of times, but now I can convert to kml
ogr2ogr -f KML output.kml intermediatefile.geojson
That works. Still interested in learning how to do this with just ogr2ogr. Thanks