Poeta Doctus

Last week’s “materialization” sought to concretize the language by collaging snippets of decontextualized conversation. This week’s tightens the knot, making “the language speak” about the language itself.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is remembered for remarking that “meaning is use.” Taking this maxim literally, I collaged together examples of every use of the word ‘gloze’ drawn from the examples supplied by the Oxford English dictionary under the word’s entry. The word is thereby lexically if not semantically “emptied out” in a cubist fashion, putting Wittgenstein’s contention to an ironic test. The poem is further self-reflexive, because the word means to glare or inspect closely; therefore, the title can be taken to be the imperative tense, instructing the reader to gloze, gloss (another meaning), or otherwise attend to the word itself. The word has the added bonus, aside from its polysemy, of being a pun on the plural of the substantive ‘glow’ and the third person singular conjugation of the verb ‘to glow’ among other things. Attentive readers will also note the poem is a chance fourteen lines….

Though this compositional procedure held promise, I exploited it only two more times, to write the poem “Gnarled Box” (along with “Gloze” included in Grand Gnostic Central) and a longer, much more complex, intertextual work that develops a passage from Lautreamont’s Poesies fittingly entitled “Poesies”.

‘Gloze’ is also the name of the first, self-published chapbook, that served as my calling card in Germany during my first European tour in 1996. And, like “Elenium” it inspired a videopoem by Ty “Jake the Dog” Hochban, viewable after the poem.

Gloze

No more men maye glosen withouten text

Than bylde materles.  With fals talkyng

Many gloses are made.  With Retorike,

Ne glosed eloquence, some to opteyn

Favour will flatter and glose, with new Glozes

Tainte the Text, and vnto you a fayned

Tale will gloze.  Give a good glose from thy strain’d

Goggle eye, peep from the watry Humour,

And glow upon any word you may gloze,

The parasite glozes with sweet speeches,

With the tongue of flattery glozing deeds,

Known only to those who have glozed over

An illusory glozing of light dismally

Glimmering, glosing with the glory of day.