Chapter 6 dealt only with the visual–verbal collaborations but, in fact, O'Hara collaborated with film directors, poets and musicians. This appendix gives some more information about these collaborations. Bibliographical details of the collaborations are given in Alexander Smith's bibliography (Smith 1979).

Collaborations with Writers

In collaborations between writers the contributors are not differentiated by different media, and can either foreground or subsume the differences in their writing style. Collaborations can consist of alternate sections written by each author, or can be more closely integrated, so that different identities are subsumed. Either way, collaboration is likely to involve an extension of each author, so the resulting product does not read like the work of either individual.

Kenneth Koch and O'Hara wrote a number of poems together: ‘The Mirror Naturally Stripped’ (O'Hara and Koch 1956a); ‘Poem’, published in the magazine Semi-Colon (O'Hara and Koch 1956b) and ‘Nina Sestina’ and ‘Bad Words’, unpublished (O'Hara and Koch undated). In an interview with me, Kenneth Koch said that when they were writing ‘The Mirror Naturally Stripped’, O'Hara and he took turns writing a line each (Koch 1986).

Although ‘The Mirror Naturally Stripped’ was written by two people, it appears to be a seamless text which uses the first-person singular rather than the first-person plural. It is not easy to tell who has written what. The poem, therefore, does not attract attention to itself as collaboration: the nearest we come to any reference to the collaboration is the word ‘criss-crosses’. Instead it foregrounds again a shared subjectivity: the dissolution of the difference between people thtough the adoption of a common literary code and a fabric of shared experience and reference. The dense, absurdist, dada-esque imagery seems to be a code which both writers tap into:

‘Poem’ consists of twelve repetitions of ‘Sky/woof ’ ‘woof/harp’ and was, according to Koch, composed on the street near the Museum of Modern Art (Koch 1986). It was published in the same edition of Semi-Colon as ‘The Mirror Naturally Stripped’. ‘Nina Sestina’ was a sestina written for Nina Castelli's sixteenth birthday.