Among the diminishing numbers of those who continue to read poetry after obligatory undergraduate bouts with the Norton Anthology, there has been a generally accepted sense that the object of poetry is perfect candor and its subject is the self. Poets in this view are expected to find their voices, a task equated with achieving personal authenticity, a one-to-one parity between the “I” or eye of the poet’s poems and who he is. This consensus view is wide enough to include as many varieties of poetry as there are personas available for authentification, but it excludes a great deal of poetry in which the poet is either not personally present or, more problematically, is present in a playful, parodic, or otherwise “inauthentic” way.

For every consensus there is an opposite, if necessarily unequal, dissensus, and one of the most distinctive of dissenting anti-voices in contemporary poetry for the past thirty years has been Kenneth Koch. By the same dialectical logic that has made Allen Ginsberg a celebrity of the establishment he inveighs against, Koch has become the founding father of, and chief spokesman for, the one branch of the poetry business to prosper during the industry’s years of decline—the business of teaching poetry. Teaching, that is, not the rigors and rigidities of the consensus style to academic apprentices, but rather instructing various captive audiences of the welfare state (schoolchildren, nursing home residents) in a more handicraft-like poetry whose organizing principle is Fun.

Koch’s poetry may be