A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents On the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem "By" Frank O'Hara

This book of experimental criticism is, at the least, of forensic interest to readers of poetry and, at the most, a study in extremes of generosity and stinginess. Whether it is Johnson (Homage to the Last Avant-Garde) who is generous and his detractors stingy%E2%80%94or vice versa%E2%80%94is another question altogether. The author delights in "thought experiment[s]" and provocation: his book offers readers, among other things, an unfinished "critical novella" containing a startling hypothesis about poets Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch: Is it possible that O'Hara's last poem, "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island," was authored, in truth, by his friend Koch in the wake of O'Hara's sudden death by dune buggy on Fire Island? The author argues that the poem may have been written by Koch and deliberately attributed to O'Hara in an act of egoless munificence. Unfortunately, because Johnson was denied permission to quote from the (conceivably elegiac) poem under discussion, the text is full of odd elisions. As if to make up for this deficiency, the book is padded with essays by the author's partisans, who defend his critical methods, some with eloquence. Though this rarefied text will likely appeal to a similarly niche audience, Johnson's work is admirable for its imagination and inventiveness. (Oct.)