Sum: A Lyric Parody

Joseph Randolph
Poetry
200 pgs.
2022
Hardcover

SUM is a collagist long poem assembled from the pre–World War II American poetry canon as a continuous field of lines governed by cadence and semantic salience. It unfolds in strophic units and is organized through parataxis, ideogrammatic construction, and spacing and lineation, drawing on imagist and objectivist procedures. Phrases are set into sequences of juxtaposition and interruption, where voice, rhythm, and reference emerge through adjacency and collision. The poem treats literary history as a present condition, where earlier forms persist as active procedures and meaning forms through their simultaneous deployment. It locates coherence within the act of reading itself, where relation is produced through attention and sequence.