J.L., Denver, USA

I’m not sleeping right now because I am maybe in love with someone I met recently who has a name I like. And I just turned in this anxiety-producing document to a panel of professors who will decide if I am worthy or not. I hope that love wins out and I can sleep with my eyes closed and my thoughts on more than words.

J.L.

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AW:

Hello JL – “More Than Words” well I hope your thoughts do indeed dwell amongst the dulcet tones and nuances of that song for the simple reason that poetry is, also, more than words. I quote Jerome Rothenburg’s comments from the little magazine some/thing 1 (Spring 1965): “For surely it should be clear by now that poetry is less literature than a process of thought & feeling & the arrangement of that into affective utterances. The conditions these definitions meet are the conditions of poetry”. The “definitions” he speaks of are a series of Aztec oral memories of objects , ‘earthly things’, compiled in the Florentine Codex:General History of the Things of New Spain, from 1547. The naming of objects in lists, praise poems, navigational directions, body parts, correspondences, is a poetry that calls out to the unique among the ordinary, the special one among the millions. 

Rothenburg also quotes Gertrude Stein, from Lectures in America:

Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not.
And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately  and vigorously not based on the noun. 
Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding, with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. 

Here is your poem, from the anthology Technicians of the Sacred, called “Egyptian God Names”:

Egyptian God Names

1. “It is Re who created his names out of his members” – Chapter 17, Book of the Dead.
2. These gods are like this in their caverns, which are in the Netherworld.
   Their bodies are in darkness.
   The Upreared One.
   Cat.
   Terrible One.
   Fat Face.
   Turned Face.
   The One belonging to the Cobra.
3. They are like this in their coffins. They are the rays of the Disk, their souls go in the following of the Great God.
   The One of the Netherworld.
   The Mysterious One.
   The One of the Cavern.
   The One of the Coffin.
   She who combs.
   The One of the Water.
   The Weaver.
4. These gods are like this: they receive the rays of the disc when it lights up the bodies of those of the Nether world. When he passes by, they enter into darkness.
   The Adorer.
   Receiving Arm.
   Arm of Light.
   Brilliant One.
   The One of the Rays.
   Arm of Dawn.
5. Salutations to Osiris.
   Osiris the Gold of Millions.
   Osiris the Great Saw.
   Osiris the Begetter.
   Osiris the Scepter.
   Osiris the King.
   Osiris on the Sand.
   Osiris in all the Lands.
   Osiris at the head of the Booth of the distant Marshlands.
   Osiris in his places which are in the South.
   Osiris at the head of his town.
6. The Cat.
   Head of Horus.
   Face of Horus.
   Neck of Horus.
   Throat of Horus.
   Iii.
   The Gory One.
7. The Swallower of Millions.

-Jerome Rothenberg