From the late 1990s, Johnson was widely thought to be the author of the Araki Yasusada writings, which a reviewer for the Nation magazine, in 1998, called “the most controversial work of poetry since Allen Ginsberg's Howl.”[1] Johnson, however, never officially claimed authorship of the material, presenting himself only as “executor” of an archive supposedly composed by a writer, or writers, whose choice was to maintain a principled anonymity in relation to the work.
In recent years, the Yasusada discussion has moved from the realm of literary scandal and gossip into considerations of more scholarly kind, and a substantial number of academic articles have engaged the topic, pro and con.
As the first book of poetry in the United States to respond to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was the subject of numerous reviews and blog commentaries, a good deal of the latter hostile.
The poem, however, concludes unexpectedly when the voice of a generic U. S. poet joins the chorus of torturers, and in good-natured tone tells his captive to stop pleading and just accept the horror of his fate, because there is, after all, nothing that poetry can do to help him.
Latterly, Johnson became the focus of controversy, including threatened legal action, when he published a book that proposed, by means of an elaborate, forensically detailed hypothesis (supplemented in the book by a quasi-detective novella), that the poet Kenneth Koch may have been the hidden author of “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” one of Frank O’Hara's canonical poems, composing it shortly after O’Hara's death, and then placing it under his late friend's name in a sui generis act of comradeship and mourning.