James Pate has revisited the possibility that Kenneth Koch wrote Frank O’Hara’s last poem, which is the thought experiment of Kent Johnson’s A Question Mark Above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery of the Famous Poem “by” Frank O’Hara. From “Some thoughts on Beckett’s Mouth and Johnson’s Sun” at Montevidayo:
Often, the idea of the writing hinges on various notions of “the private”: I shape my experience, I tell my story, I find my voice, I am part of a community of other people finding their voices.
As well-meaning as this rhetoric might be, it is also short-sighted and exclusionary. Experience becomes another type of private property. The “I” becomes singular and substantial, and the Subject must be fenced off in order for self-coherence to remain in place.
Writing becomes not an act of invention, but an investigation into roots and origins. Writing becomes not a search for new ways of thinking and experiencing, but a search for foundations, for psychological certitudes.
Of course, according to Pate, those psychological certitudes only redirect metaphysics into “the division between fiction and truth, the corporeal and incorporeal.” Also mentioned are Samuel Beckett’s Not I and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Three Versions of Judas.” Here’s the poem in question, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.”