At the Galleria Shopping Mall

Unexpected, even jarring insight in unexpected places at unexpected moments, is the reward of engaging a Tony Hoagland poem. As poet of the everyday world that exists all about each of us unnoticed and unsuspected of carrying the weight of insight, Hoagland is keen to the act and art of noticing, alert to the premise that the routine world of busy offices, backyards, kitchens, parks, and, yes, malls erupts quietly, regularly, and shatters the routine with a truth-enough, an epiphany that gifts the poem (and the world) with provocative revelation.

A nondescript mall, busy with dedicated shoppers, its walkways lined with storefronts hawking sales items, is hardly ground-zero for an epiphany, hardly heavy with the promise of revelation. More likely to get an Orange Julius and a hot pretzel in the food court than a life-altering realization, right? Hoagland is not so sure. In these opening decades of the second millennium, he argues that perhaps what civilizations used to find in churches, that is, an environment ripe for revelation, his contemporary hip and happening post-postmodern consumer culture might indeed find in a mall. The poet certainly goes there without expectation of insight. But insight comes anyhow.

Distracted as he enters the cavernous complex with his young niece, who is eager to shop, he is drawn initially to the cheap televisions displayed in an appliance store. The network feeds contrast sharply and suggest the division at the heart of the poem: News footage, presumably from the American invasion of Iraq or perhaps the occupation of Afghanistan (either military operation would fit the poem’s timeline of composition), makes the conflict seem “far off” (Line 3). That is within the simulated non-world of the hermetically-sealed mall; reality, complex with real-time consequences, seems distant, irrelevant, as trivial as the other television’s show comparing breast sizes of two actresses. Both feeds make implicit what the poet fears: In the magic non-world of the shopping mall, reality itself is rendered strangely ironic.

If the poet is momentarily distracted by pondering the two television screens and the implications of juxtaposing their feeds, his niece, born in the new century, born into the irrational world of 24-7 media sweeps, is decidedly uninterested in the cheap television, intent as she is in getting down to the hard business of shopping. She is already developed not physically but emotionally well beyond her tender years. She invades the mall impatiently, expectantly, in power strides that suggest the “flounce of a pedigreed blonde” (Line 8). She is at the mall for a purpose—not to ruminate on the American culture willing not to make distinctions between the tragedy of war and the frivolous fascination with the breast size of actresses, but to undertake the grand adventure-journey of securing stuff. Lucinda swings her parents’ credit card like a scythe cutting through the store’s aisles and aisles of “golden merchandise” (Line 12). This, the poet intones, “is the day she embarks on her journey” (Line 10). Weaponizing a credit card at such a young age, Lucinda is fearless as she confidently immerses herself in the “dazzling bounty” (Line 15) of the Galleria.

Even as the girl relishes the sheer plenty of the mall and the quiet power implicit in the credit card, the poet is not quite so upbeat. “Today is the day,” he worries, “she stops looking at faces / and starts assessing the labels of purses” (Lines 13-14). In this, the poem splits. If the experience of the mall and the adrenaline rush of shopping while wielding a credit card is Lucinda’s, the insight belongs to her uncle. He sees what a nine year old cannot, that her rush to acquire stuff reveals that at a young age she has already begun to do what consumer America inevitably teaches its people must do: get things. What the poet realizes is that what Lucinda loses even as she disappears into the dizzying plenty of the department store is the value she had to that point placed on real-time people (her family and friends) and their reality (their faces, voices, presence). She is only nine—and she has already lost the child’s interest in all those around her, surrendered to the magnetic pull of stuff.

For the poet, this is a changing moment. Lucinda, he suddenly sees, is not the same girl who walked into the mall. The mall, its sheer scope, its oppressive there-ness, changes Lucinda in the speechlessly quick moment of their entry. She is no longer a girl—she is suddenly an American girl, raised to embrace the logic of consumerism, to live compelled by the open, unclosing palm of desire. In this, the poet sees a disturbing echo from Greek mythology: two tales, one centered on the nymph Daphne, the other on the Princess Coronis. In both tales, young, comely, beautiful girls, innocent and threatened by hard forces they cannot begin to control, dramatically lose their humanity: Daphne is turned into a tree, Coronis into a crow.

The expectation in the myths of Antiquity is that the metamorphosis of those characters will, in turn, teach those who hear the story some vital “kind of lesson” (Line 20). The poet is quick to offer the lesson he has learned as he watches his niece nimbly, confidently, unironically immerse herself in the department store wonderland. She is, he sees, now more alone than she suspects, more apart than she grasps, more lost than she can comprehend. The lesson is as on point as it is disturbing: As we, each of us, turn into Americans, we must “learn something about loneliness” (Line 20).