A Question Mark Above the Sun

Cover image*, A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem "by" Frank O'Hara

*(original cover image suppressed)

Kent Johnson‘s new book has now been published, despyte the concerted efforts of a cabal of poets, literary estate executors, and lawyers for bigwig publishing houses to keep it from ever seeing the light of day (so to speak). Publisher Richard Owens (Punch Press, Damn the Caesars) must take a goodlie portion of the credit for seeing this project through. Not only did Owens bear the brunt of the pressure — in the form of threatening messages and letters on an almost daily basis in the weeks preceding publication — but his work as desygner, printer, and editor mark the product as a truly collaborative effort. More to the point, thanks to Owens and his close working relationship with Johnson as they dodged the slings and arrows of litigious fortune while putting this together, the form of the book folds perfectlie with its content in ways that one almost never encounters anymore. Which is to say, even more precisely, that the ethos of Punch Press, with its emphasis on handmade products and keen awareness of historical small press literary culture, is the perfect match with Kent Johnson’s career-long project of troubling literary origins and authenticity.

Specifically, of course, Johnson troubles the origins of the posthumously published “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” which, as the book states in its opening pages, “is universally regarded as one of the preeminent poems in the Frank O’Hara canon.” The entire argument and background of the book is set out succinctly in its opening paragraph:

What you have in your hands is a kind of thought experiment. It proffers the idea that a radical, secret gesture of poetic mourning and love was carried out by Kenneth Koch in memory of his close friend Frank O’Hara. I present the hypothesis as my own very personal expression of homage for the two great poets. The proposal I set forward here, nevertheless, is likely to make some readers annoyed, perhaps even indignant. Some already are. A few fellow writers, even, have worked hard through legal courses to block this book’s publication. The forced redaction of key quotations herein (replaced by paraphrase) is one result of their efforts; the edition’s beautiful original covers have also been suppressed.

So there you have it. In brief, the book proposes that Kenneth Koch may in fact be the author of “A True Account,” which, depending on your point of view, would either be the generous act of mourning that Johnson describes, or a malicious instance of chicanery and deception. The long introductory essay goes on to provide the background for investigations into this question, carefully laying out the case for Koch’s possible authorship of the poem. It effectively sets the scene for the entirely plausible rationale behind the argument that the rest of the book will explore.

And upon having read it, my first reaction is, I’m not sure what all the fuss was about in terms of the recent lawyerly saber-rattling.

The text itself was perhaps best described by Owens during his recent visit to Buffalo to see it through the final stages of printing — he called it a literary-critical Tristram Shandy. Indeed, Johnson so dramatizes the metanarrative of his thesis that this is the first book of critical inquiry about which I’m afraid to say too much, for fear of giving away the plot. And it does have one, compleat with villayns and heroes.

The first of these emerge during the highly entertaining section “Corroded by Symbolysme: An Unfinished Novella.” The section fancifully details Johnson’s sojourns in England during various conferences, and his mysterious encounters with British poets intent on preventing the publication of the original “tape essay” by Tosa Motokiyu in which the alternate “True Account” authorship theory was first proposed.

Prominent among these is J.H. Prynne. Apparently the leader of this odd “fellowship of the ring” dedicated to preserving the legacy of Frank O’Hara, Prynne goes white on first hearing of the impending publication of said tape essay during a meeting with Johnson, and the latter subsequently reports incidents of harassment from anonymous callers bearing British accents.

That’s the central plot of the section — eerily foreshadowing the actual harassment detailed in the appendices to the book — but it’s really a critique of authorship and legacy, a meditation on transatlantic poetic relations (or lack thereof), and a subtle reconsideration of critical tropes related to language poetry, all of which reflect on and interlace with the book’s central thesis.

The English literary world Johnson describes is a Lynchian vision of Cambridge pub crawls, where poets are prone to illustrate discussions of their work by bursting up and reciting poems on the spot, prompting the awed patrons to clap in a “respectful waye, not sarcasticallie, as would have been the case if this had been the Unyted States.” Invariably, there are pub denizens left “dabbing their eyes” after the reading; invariably, the poet finishes with “sweat pouring from his sideburnians.”

Johnson follows up these encounters with email exchanges with the poets (these include — besides Prynne — Andrew Duncan, Tim Atkins, and Martin Corless-Smith) in which he further queries them. (There is an added wrinkle here, involving Johnson’s “preferred font size,” which very humorously comments on the typographical hierarchy of such exchanges as they’re received from various figures and integrated into the text… but again, I don’t want to spoil it for you.) The argument is advanced obliquely, by suggestion; with the exception of the Prynne-O’Hara conspiracy that hovers over the whole section, that portion of the thesis remains secondary to interrogations of “subjectivity and myth” (Duncan); the “analytic wing” of language poetry (Prynne); translation (Atkins); the lyric, fragment, and authorship (Corless-Smith); and so on.

Meanwhile, Tony Towle emerges as the villayn of the second half of the book, in which the tape interview finally appears, followed by Towle’s excruciating, exasperatingly meticulous efforts to disprove the facticity of events (such as the tape interview) that Johnson repeatedlie takes pains to specify as fictitious to begin with. (As Johnson has explained to Owens, Motokiyu’s collaborators during the interview with Joe LeSueur are apparently figments of Motokiyu’s imagination, which certainly calls into question the veracity of the interview itself. Nevertheless, as Johnson points out, LeSueur’s words are essentially real… As the notes to the essay make clear, “[t]hese remarks by LeSueur … appear, albeit in slightly revised form, in his memoir, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara.”)

Johnson unpacks Towle’s objections to the Koch-as-author idea, attempting to refute and qualify them one by one. Not being an O’Hara or Koch scholar, and not being terribly invested in the question of who wrote the actual poem, I would rather not comment on the strength of the arguments or which of them seems most convincing. I will just say that:

1) While the weight of the evidence that is brought to light does not definitively prove anything, the work Johnson and Motokiyu have done at the very least effectively calls the authorship of the poem into question.

2) The recent discovery, by John Latta, of the Koichi K. O’Hara poem, reprinted in the book with accompanying commentary, at the very least proves that Koch (assuming he is the actual author of this poem, as one must strongly suspect) was willing to write in O’Hara’s voice, or imaginatively collaborate with him, whichever one prefers.

In that sense, A Question Mark… more than succeeds. The literary world awaits a serious critical assessment of Johnson’s highly collaborative, genre-challenging, authorial-destabilizing, heteronymic output to date. Consider: The Yasusada texts, and their challenge to ideas of poetic translation and what I’ve called in a previous post the “dead author effect.” The Miseries of Poetry, which again dealt with translation and the role of the editor/translator as co-creator, as well as the importance of gaps and fissures in ancient texts and their ability to confer authority and meaning. Johnson’s Day, which called the bluff of appropriation proposed by Kenny Goldsmith. Finally, A Question Mark…, which casts the destabilization of authority backwards in time, brilliantly lighting on a legendary moment of posthumous genius which many poets are so invested in the memory of that they’re willing to stir up great legal machinations to protect it.

And in doing so, they accomplish nothing so much as help Johnson prove his point. In fact, their indignant refusal to entertain his “thought experiment” is the point. This is what seems so remarkable — did Towle and the other poets who’ve signed on with the censorship effort in regards to this text, not to mention the Koch and O’Hara estates, not foresee the way in which their strenuous and highly public objections would feed right into Johnson’s project? And bolster his main point?

It staggers the mind. All of these legal wranglings, which forced Owens to remove any direct quotes from the poem in question, as well as any tangential text that might conceivably transgress nebulous copyright laws, only underwrite and extend the collaboratively porous nature of the bookum. Already, of course, the first portion of the tome is composed as much or more of responses from various figures with whom Johnson ruminates on finer points of poetic authorship; the second half is suffused by Towles’ and others’ contributions and objections, so that one is left to wonder how much of this text can actually be attributed to Johnson. Meanwhile, due to the elisions, the book is so riddled with holes and gaps that the reader is forced to consult any number of bios and poetry collections to get a sense of the missing references.

I find it to be a worthy addition to the Johnson canon. Which is, of course, to say that it’s a worthy subtraction. Which is, again, never just an addition or subtraction from his own authorial canon, but an addition or subtraction from any number of possible canons, from your canon, O’Hara’s, Koch’s, from the canon itself…

Sadly, this printing of the book has already sold out via subscription; please keep an eye out for the trade edition, to follow soon.