First review of Kent Johnson's 'A Question Mark Above the Sun:Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem "By" Frank O'Hara'
http://pearlblossomhighway.blogspot.com/
Excerpt from the review:
The question he seems to be asking is not so much, "Did Frank O'Hara or Kenneth Koch write the poem?" as much as it is, "Why is it important to attribute a work of art to the name of an individual artist and to protect that name as a sign of artistic genius?" and "What, exactly, are they trying to protect?"
It returns us to the kinds of questions Kent has been asking publicly for years about the ways in which poetry hierarchies function and how coteries of friends, or alumni of prestigious east coast universities, or poets of a certain generation and/or geographic location, protect their own, while simultaneously claiming an objective and innocent love of great art, regardless of its source. These are often questions of class and race and gender, though I think Kent is more interested in the functioning of power qua power, less about its specific manifestations
|