Sum: A Lyric Parody

Joseph Randolph
Poetry
200 pgs.
2024
Hardcover

SUM is a long conceptual life-poem in the American modernist tradition, positioned as the 21st century’s "poem including history." Rooted in the vast spectrum of canonical poets and their influences, both foreign and mythological, up until the end of WWII, this monumental work is relentlessly experimental and written to be reworked throughout the author’s life. Dedicated to interrogating historical material through poetic form, it draws primary inspiration from Zukofsky’s "A."

From the author:

"SUM is a work. Life writes it, I write it. It is written and rewritten, never done until I am. Five books, five movements, five ecosystems—each distinct but same as fingers are to a hand.

LIVEFOREVER, the first: a patchwork—voices of American poets, their strophes, their myths, foreign tongues all stitching one breath that spans from the Revolution to the war, a whole chorus inside history’s lungs.

Next: short cuts, ‘TANKAS & CINQUAINS’—images cut sharp, compressed to their densest states, like matter collapsing into singularities. Five lines, maybe, where Crane stretched a bridge, I step across in one.

The third, ‘SIMULTANEITY’: thought as quantum, language as wave. Every word is two or three, a superposition of meaning, reader collapsing what could be into what is, just like that.

Then comes the making. ‘IF THROUGH MY UNKNOWING,’ fourth book, where form and content are one, fused, an adequation. Words broken, scattered. The page is more than just ink, it is space, it is breath, a material thing with edges you can’t see.

Finally, ‘ORPHEUS MOSAIC’: mirrors converging. Orpheus sung again through shards.

SUM is not finished. It will not be, cannot be—until I am."