Word: ko
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...KO, OR A SEASON ON EARTH (115 pp.) -Kenneth Koch-Grove (clothbound $3.50; paperback...
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...
...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...