Prosody Lost

KO, OR A SEASON ON EARTH (115 pp.) --Kenneth Koch--Grove (clothbound $3.50; paperback $1.45).

Unlike long novels, long poems are firmly out of fashion, and in some ways the fact is regrettable. There is an exhilaration, a knowledge of manliness gained by the reader who establishes his base camps on, say, Milton's Paradise Lost, climbs from couloir to crag, and at last reaches the summit. Now Poet Kenneth Koch, an instructor in humanities at Columbia College, has defied the trend by writing a 115-page comic poem, a kind of lesser Catskill among epics, which offers a not very strenuous practice climb with hot-dog stands every hundred yards.

Corner on the Pooch Market. The main themes of Ko are, as its dust jacket states, "baseball, neurosis, art and death; travel, weather, self-realization and power; love, error, prophesy, destruction and pleasure." Among the characters who reel through the commotion of Koch's jouncing, rhymed octaves (following the rhythm of Byron's Don Juan) are Ko, a young Japanese pitcher who earns a tryout with the Dodgers and throws with such force that he shatters grandstands: Dog Boss, a financier who has cornered the pooch market; Amaranth, the king of England; a nameless but enchanted fish; and Huddel, a cockney. The cast might have come from the nightmare of a blintz-tormented sorcerer, and its actions provide no political, religious or metaphysical insights.

Although Koch worked on the poem eight hours a day for four months (in Italy, "on my wife's Fulbright"), he is really just having fun. And he is always perfectly willing to let a chance rhyme divert his attention. While "snow From the high Himalayas comes unstuck," he writes. "Let's pause a moment, like a dairy truck." The next several stanzas, goofily irrelevant, are about a milkman.

Almanacs to Teach. Now and then Koch owes a nod to Ogden Nash ("For what is nice in Kalamazoo's its monicker. As in Atlantic City Miss America"), but just as often he writes a line that is patently new and pleasant. When all the girls in Kansas take off their clothes (there may be a metaphysical insight here, after all) Koch observes that their bodies are "almanacs to teach . . . the poet how to shape his lines. The woodsman what is lacking in the pines." All manner of things happen to the author's creatures; Ko pitches a perfect game, King Amaranth decides that England's girls should undrape too, and several characters turn into statues. Analyzing these events is no more profitable than dissecting a soap bubble, or trying to explain a minor character named Higby, who "wears a wig be-/Cause he has no hair at all beneath/The wig he wears because he has no hair." The reader recognizes Koch's Ko as good comedy,

Just as when entering the Plaza de Toros

One knows which side is sol, or as a cat Knows which gray spot is mouse, or when, in Boris,

The tenor sings 'Marina!' you know who Marina is: the one he's singing to.

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