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versity of Japan / Ko had already begun his studies ..." begins
Mr. Koch, with nary an invocation of the muse. "Meanwhile,"
however, remains his favorite word throughout the poem, robustly
shoving the divers episodes into their lines in a kind of narrative
relay-race, guiding the reader about the face of the globe whereon
the action rambles, substituting for structure and maintaining a
semblance of order. These various episodes involve the adventures
of, among others, a British proletaran named Huddel; a private
detective named Andrews; a kind of Sax Rohmer international
manipulator with a fixation on dogs; and a poet named Joseph
Dah who is not content with metaphor but demands in life and
art a real
becoming-Mr.
Koch calls him an 'action poet,' and,
as his daughter Doris explains to her lover Andrews as her father
rushes into the cabin of a yacht in the form of a dog,
Dad's integrity
Makes him, unlike most poets, actualize
In everyday life the poem's unreality.
That dog you saw on deck with steel-gray eyes
Was but a creation of Dad's terrible musical potency.
Then seeing the dog there made him realize
That the dog was himself, since by himself created,
So in this poem it's incorporated!
(Even this stanza, by the way, reveals some of the poem's most
common resources in the near Miltonic parody of the penulti–
mate line as well as in the strained gag-like humor in the "I-don't-
care-if-it-doesn't-rhyme-or - scan-very-well-the -last-three-words-are–
a-riot"
quality of the fifth one.) The plot of the whole poem keeps
cross-cutting from one of these stories to another, returning to Ko
and the Dodgers and a crucial game with Cincinnati from time
to time, and every once in a while bringing two or more of its
strands in a deliberately over-contrived fashion, while Mr. Koch
crows with delight over the coincidences he has engineered. The
poem's narrative technique must be traced back to Ariosto, I
think, rather than merely to Byron (who is, of course, .obviously
present here and there); the comic impulse is more toward a
rich, zany riot of improbability than toward the embodiment of a
