Three bodhisatvas to you, too

Hua Hsu writes about literary hoaxes in general and raises the fascinating case of the Yasusada poems:

A case in point was the poetry of Araki Yasusada, a Hiroshima survivor whose striking voice and fine, sensual imagery caught the attention of editors at Grand Street and The American Poetry Review in the early 1990s. ...Sketches and workbooks seemed to confirm Yasusada's identity as an A-bomb survivor who had worked as a postal worker in Hiroshima until his death in 1972. But on closer inspection, his life was rife with impossible claims...
After the inconsistencies in Yasusada's patchy, impossible story were exposed on Internet message boards by academics and poets in 1996, some of the same people who had praised the unnerving beauty of his poems now lined up to strike them down as dangerous and possibly racist. American Poetry Review editor Arthur Vogelsang, who had published a number of Yasusada's poems, denounced the hoax as ''essentially a criminal act."
Today, the true author of the verse gathered together in the 1997 volume ''Doubled Flowering" is commonly believed to be a Midwestern poet named Kent Johnson. But Johnson--who is currently preparing a new book of Yasusada's letters and prose titled ''Also, With My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords" (Combo Books)--claims the hoax was in fact the doing of his friend, the late (and possibly fictional) Japanese-American poet Tosa Motokiyu. Some observers speculated that the promoter of this unknown Japanese poet was in fact expressing some kind of long-suppressed, white male rage. If Johnson couldn't find acclaim with his own words, why not borrow the voice of another, more fashionable kind of victim?

Some of the strangest documents in the case can be found at Jacket magazine, published by Kent Johnson. Don't miss the "Yasusada letters":

"I am just reappeared from work and covered with so many lily pollens. Achoo! May three boddhisatvas go into an orifice of you. Thank you."