Sum: A Lyric Parody

Joseph Randolph
Poetry
200 pgs.
2024
Hardcover

SUM enters the American long-poem tradition through the front door—Whitman’s democratic catalogues, Pound’s collage of world-historical fragments, Zukofsky’s lattice of music and Marxism—while carrying in its wake the midcentury confessional, the projective and Black Mountain schools, and the conceptual and documentary experiments that followed. Its governing principle, “simultaneity,” borrows from Einstein’s relativity but recasts it in phenomenological terms: that events, moods, and meanings—no matter how distant in time or register—are co-present in consciousness, awaiting activation. The poem draws into itself nearly the entire American canon before 1955—Williams’s pared immediacy, H.D.’s mythic density, Cummings’s kinetic line, and more—processing these influences until they circulate as living tissue in its own body. These lineages intermingle with the destabilizing procedures of postmodern language writing, producing a polyphonic structure in which the American long poem’s encyclopedic ambition is not simply remembered but re-enacted, its architectures of influence revealed as ongoing processes. In the act of reading, the whole of literary history remains alive, simultaneous, and available for reconfiguration.