RINGShout

None of the poems in this short collection were written for publication. They exist, with one or two exceptions, in the marginalia of the autograph manuscripts of jjhudsson: that is; the various stories concerning Professor Summanus Horthólary - the eighteenth century Gallic sleuth whose escapades with giants, witches and early flight can be read in The Lays of Maladie series; the intergalactic and philosophical wanderings of Menlo, in the novel Other Places Which Also Are the World’s End; and in an emerging work that seems to revolve around an improbable combination of vikings and modern defence espionage.

The subject of jjhudsson’s marginalia is examined in more detail in the Tricky Genre Blog Nea-ly, but not Quite. Here, we need only observe that there is scarcely a page of autograph MS that does not have on its margins or, more frequently, verso, a handwritten note-to-self, plot idea, character name or, as in the case here, a few lines of verse.

In fact, when you know what to look for, there is quite a lot of verse. Thus far, we have discovered at least fifty complete poems among the archive, and hundreds of orphaned lines which must surely relate to some poetic thought or other in the mind of jjhudsson.

If these jottings were not written for publication, why publish them now? Indeed, why publish them at all?

Two reasons. First, as a corpus, they provide a rare glimpse into the mind of jjhudsson. As anyone who has read his obscure and self-written biography on the Tricky Genre Press website will appreciate, this is not a man who cares to share his persona with the world. In these poems, perhaps, we can gain insight into the mind that creates planets, dragons, religious cults and a whole Department of France.

Secondly, jjhudsson has allowed us to do so. Well, perhaps ‘allow’ is overstating things: he has not forbidden their publication. When we showed him the galleys for this first e-booklet, they came back with a few notes which we have included at the end of each booklet, and some minor edits. We take this to be sanction enough.

A poem, wrote Horthólary at the end of the eighteenth century, is a feeling lost in time and space. There is nothing concrete about it. If that is true, no poem can be said to have universal meaning. Our feelings, our time and our space are unique to us, and the words scratched out on a winter’s evening by a woman when the harvest has been bad and the children are hungry cannot mean the same to the man reading them on the 7.48 to London two hundred years later - even is he is moved to tears. There is an eternal mystery about a poem so charged.

In his book The White Goddess, Robert Graves goes further. To him the poet was a shaman, a mystic, a magician; someone in whom the accumulated spiritual knowledge of the tribe had been vested. And the poems were that knowledge - rhymed, riddled, symbolised and metaphored into something recognisable only to the initiated. To recite a poem like The Battle of the Trees (Cad Giddeu), was, to Graves, to be uttering aloud the inner feelings, emotions, beliefs and histories of our ancient ancestors, if only we knew how to decode them.

Graves’ book was given a wide berth by contemporary scholars. Even the great poetic mystic, T.S. Eliot professed himself dumbfounded by it (see notes). But there is something powerful in the idea of the poet as mystic; in daring to suppose that the jumbled words on the page before you are not merely artistic or contorted grammar, but that there is a meaning in them.

We make no such claim for the poems of jjhudsson. These are not the works of a palaeolithic shaman, no matter how primitive his personal habits. They are, however, feelings outside their time and space, as Horthólary expressed it. Therefore, they are - or ought to be - mystical to us, who are not him, and who did not experience that feeling; who were not present in that time, who did not occupy that space. To us, they might seem magical in the mind, if not beautiful on the lips.

The poems in this slim volume cover an array of experiences and the writer’s reaction to them: from the challenges of growing up and finding one’s place in the world (or learning how to manage when we can’t), to the disconnection and banality of loss; from the knowledge of how we came to be, to the passions that created us. And the simple wonder of something extraordinary. There may be magical meanings in them, but if there are, they are known only to jjhudsson.

What we find in reading them - we who were not there - is sometimes resonant, sometimes familiar; often touching and sympathetic, perhaps, on occasion, insightful, even beautiful; and yes, maybe - in certain places - a little mystical. We think these reasons enough to publish these poems. We hope that you enjoy them - or at least are as intrigued by them, as we have been.

Notes

Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A historical grammar of poetic myth. Faber & Faber (1948).

For the views of T.S. Eliot on The White Goddess, see Judith Kroll, Chapters in a Mythology; The poetry of Sylvia Plath. Harper Colphon Edition (1978 cf. pp. 50).

Here's the pre-story;

A jawbone, red with iron, shouts it out.

Dislocated in time, we hear only the gutteral grunts of the beast;

Disarticulated gestures worthy, to our mind,

Of the armoured ridges that weigh-down the unintelligent eye.

And what does it see, this shivered hulk of sinewed passion - child's bane, journalist's caricature?

Enough to make blood run cold.

For the mountains have sloughed-off their icy caps

And sent them sheeting across the plains, cascading through valleys in frozen torrents,

Biting earth, riming rock.

No Garden of Eden this.

A tree-less, wind-scoured, glacier-scape,

Home to unimaginable beasts and shaggy nightmares spat onto any sheltering stone.

But stones speak.

Tortoise-shelled and shouldered with care,

They tell us of a future for this creature, and no doubt, then, a past;

So it is swept along in the currents of Time;

And if cast out of the main stream into this Bavarian backwater;

If pinched out of existence by the unremembering fingers of evolution,

This jowl at least once called out its name.

Scavenging the shards of Time a slender hand,

Offended by irregularity, pleased by cunning.

Here we stand, out of breath from the hemispherical march of our own evolution.

Turn wolf to puppy,

Tusk to pin.

Stitch together a new prehistory with Kane hands;

Disown making-do for do-making

And turn green stone to copper,

Grass to bread.

Drawn upward from the mudded clay,

Impressed with artistry, hardened by flame

Here is a fellow we recognize

Here is us.

NOTES

This poem is based on the corresponding chapter in D.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World (Vienna 1936, this edition Yale University Press 2008).]

Book Two: Small Ending

Preface

I. Once upon a time

II. Commuter Belt

III. Girl Emergent

IV. Boarding Pass

V. The Great Inventor

VI. Scent

VII. Small Ending

Ringshout is the collected poetry of jjhudsson. The completed work will comprise seven booklets, each of six to eight poems. The EPUB booklets will be released over the coming year.

Book 1 - Splash!

Book 2 - Small Ending

Book 3 - Second Hand

Book 4 - On Somerton Beach

Book 5 - Last Supper

Book 6 - Unbedded Again

Book 7 - Ringshout