22 pages • 44-minute read
At the Galleria Shopping Mall
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Literary Devices
Form
At its most immediate level, “At the Galleria” seems effortlessly formless, really anti-poetic, mimicking more the casual eloquence of observation. Yet it is deftly, subtly designed. The poem is executed in couplets of long lines that do not abide any kind of anticipated rhythm or rhyme, yet the long and sinewy lines create a feeling of casual and inviting immediacy, welcoming the reader into the basic situation—who in Hoagland’s culture has not walked into a mall?—unaware they are in fact dealing with a highly pitched moment of fast approaching insight. The poem does not feel, read, or scan like a poem. The reader is caught unawares—as if we are heading to the mall, like the poet/speaker, expecting anything but an epiphany.
The diction is accessible and decidedly not poetic. The lines read as conversational. The style is lean and athletic with a kind of fetching crispness that suggests only loosely that this is a poem. The couplets effortlessly move one to the next—the poet seldom stops a couplet from moving to the next with end-punctuation. Read aloud the poem is seamless, moving with its own quiet kinetics. The lines are executed without the commanding and self-justifying rhythms of a clear, clean beat—they are far more like jazz, the lines define their own pace and read more like improvisation than design.
The design elements that define the form—sly syllable count variations, the use of long vowel sounds and clipped guttural consonants, the placement of commas—are subtle, quiet. For instance, at the poem’s pivotal observation in which the poet/speaker compares the nine-year-old Lucinda to mythic characters, beautiful and innocent, who lost their humanity in an effort to preserve their humanity, the lines are suddenly cut short, the casual and conversational motion abruptly stopped, signaling the difficult epiphany that the poet/speaker at that moment experiences. And that formal patterning repeats in the closing couplet when the speaker/poet shares his difficult epiphany, the broken line reflecting his own unsettling realization of the dark loneliness at the heart of consumer-America.
Meter
There is a syllable-crisp sharpness to Hoagland’s prosody that creates the sonic rhythms of meter without relying on gimmicky (and for Hoagland outdated) expectations of regular percussive beat. The lines themselves are elastic, capturing the unexpected rhythm of conversational communications, which Hoagland studied diligently. How does conversational speech avoid monotony, which for Hoagland too often defined more traditionally metered verse?
Defined by Hoagland’s ear for ever-shifting tempo (rather than regular beat), Hoagland’s poem invites recitation. The open lines invite a kind of improvisational performance—each time a reader can linger over this word rather than that word. The poem provides a kind of chorus—such as with the repeated dramatic phrase “This is the day”—but otherwise the poem unfolds along its own speed. The occasional collisions of consonance (all those s’s, all those d’s) and the quiet flutter of assonance (all those hard i’s all those elaborate e’s) provide a sort of meter, but such moments are more conversational than they are the forced language games of an overarching poet intent on tapping out a meter. The poem discovers its own tempo, and even that could be different each time it is performed.
Voice
The voice that delivers “At the Galleria” wants to share a critical (and disturbing) insight into the fierce American consumer culture in the new millennium. Indicting their era for its moral or ethical carelessness has been the job of public poets since Antiquity. In that role, the poet assumes an august stature apart, looking down on that culture, askance at its implications. The voice is consequently deliberate, stately, chiseled, carefully and conventionally sculpted to create about the poet the feel and gravitas of a Poet, capital P. But Hoagland’s voice does not aspire to that stature. The voice in Hoagland’s poem, alarmed by the culture and its materialistic ethos, also wants to share a moment of emotional growth involving a trip to the mall with his own niece, a moment of insight into their relationship and into her evolution into adulthood. The voice then must be both public and private. That makes voice tricky, or to use a favorite term of Hoagland’s, “skittery.”
How can the poet be both wise and accessible and illuminating like a Poet and yet as confused and befuddled, amused and bemused as a poet? The voice in Hoagland’s poem maintains that difficult balance. Accessible, yes; the speaker is one of us, certainly, but apart, engaged in ways the rest of us are not, seeing into the things we pass without regard, without noting their wider implications. The diction is everyday diction, the syntax direct, any obvious poetic touches (sonic interplay and regular rhythm) underplayed and subtle. He is one of us. But the eye of the poet, the objects that command the poet’s attention and their levels of suggestion, as well as his familiarity with the myths of Antiquity (or “olden stories” as he calls them in Line 18) and how they inform a contemporary world, encourages looking to the poet for that wider, more philosophical eye of insight. It is a delicate balance. The voice reveals a poet/speaker who is one of us, just keener, more alert, and in the end more reflective.
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