A poem that seems at once reassuringly accessible and inviting yet pivots in a single devastating epiphany into an indictment of an America terminally distracted by the materialism of its own consumer culture, Tony Hoagland’s “At the Galleria Shopping Mall” (2010) explores the dark heart of yearning that defines a culture driven by the expectation, more the anticipation, of acquisition. In sharing the story of taking his nine-year-old niece, Lucinda, to a local mall, the poet (presumably Hoagland) cannot help but notice how quickly the vast multi-tiered mall of nested shops quickly (and he fears unalterably) converts his niece into a shopping addict at the expense, he says only half-jokingly, of nothing less than her innocence, specifically a child’s saving sense of others, the girl’s very humanity.

The poem works on that dynamic between what the poet realizes and what the young girl realizes: He glimpses the moral emptiness of consumer capitalism, she just wants to buy stuff, lots of stuff. Published when Hoagland had already established himself as one of the most charismatic and provocative voices in the generation of American poets that had emerged as the fascination waned with the “self-absorbed” Confessional poets of the mid-century, “At the Galleria” reveals Hoagland’s interest not so much in sharing the poet’s private emotional lacerations as in locating that wounded and feeling poet within a rapidly-changing new millennium American culture.

Poet Biography

Anthony Dey (Tony) Hoagland’s biography reflects the tension that would define the poetry of his maturity: The tension between belonging and alienation, between the reality of rootlessness and the yearning for home, between being apart from yet being a part of an America that at once fascinated and disturbed him.

Hoagland had what would be called a peripatetic childhood. The son of a career Army surgeon and a stay-at-home mom, Hoagland was born in 1953 on the army base at Fort Bragg in the mountains of south-central North Carolina, where his father held a residency. Before Hoagland completed high school, his family, Hoagland’s older sister and twin brother, would move six times, including stays in Hawaii, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, and even several months in Ethiopia. Hoagland learned early on that stability and roots were chimerical, and he learned to rely on himself. He knew very little about his extended family, and his parents never introduced their kids to any form of religion. Not entirely surprisingly, Hoagland struggled to make friends and found comfort and companionship largely in reading. He was a voracious reader, including initially the dark tales of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, but he ultimately gravitated toward poetry, particularly the rural wisdom verses of New England’s Robert Frost and the post-war cultural satires of Britain’s W. H. Auden. In poetry, Hoagland would say later, he found stability.

He briefly attended Williams College in Williamstown in western Massachusetts. Although Hoagland relished the deep beauty of the surrounding Berkshires, he completed his degree, in general humanities, in 1974 at the University of Iowa, known then as now for its program for promising writers. It was at Iowa that

Hoagland found his poet-mentor, eventual Nobelist Louise Glück, one of the most important of the post-war generation of Confessional poets.

For more than 10 years Hoagland enjoyed a kind of crazy on-the-road life, taking classes at small colleges throughout the West while earning pocket money in a variety of odd jobs before completing his MFA at the University of Arizona in 1983. After accepting a creative writing position at the University of Houston, Hoagland, almost 40, published his first book of verse in 1992.

Over the next 20 years, Hoagland published his verse, at once witty, meditative, and caustic anatomies of his America, in prestigious literary journals. His 2003 collection What Narcissism Means to Me was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hoagland found an appreciative audience for his readings in colleges and at poetry festivals, long evenings of convivial chatting which often turned on Hoagland sharing stories of his conversion to Buddhism, his love/hate relationship with pop culture, and his happy years following the folk rock band The Grateful Dead.

He retired from teaching in 2009 and moved to the mountains outside Santa Fe with his wife, novelist and poet Kathleen Lee. He died there at the age of 64 in 2018 from pancreatic cancer.

Poem Text

Hoagland, Tony. “At the Galleria Shopping Mall.” 2011. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem is a narrative, or more exactly a recounting of a moment when an uncle, presumably Hoagland, took his niece, Lucinda, then nine years old, to a local mall most likely in Houston. There is in fact not much of a story, if story is measured by plot points and suspense and some kind of climactic moment. Basically, the uncle and the niece arrive at the mall and the uncle notices an unexpectedly broad emotional reaction in his niece. She seems surprisingly quite at home among the shops, she is ready to shop. That is the plot. At that moment, the uncle realizes something the girl does not. He recognizes how easily, how effortlessly at such a young age she has already become a consumer, more interested in the labels on purses than she is in walking alongside her uncle or really paying attention to any of those who crowd the Galleria walkways.

As the uncle and niece enter the mall and begin to window shop, a juxtaposition immediately engages the speaker: amid all the bric-a-brac for sale in the mall shops, he notices two cheap foreign-made televisions displayed in an appliance store window. Although he cannot, obviously, hear the broadcast, he notes one shows footage from an ongoing “far-off” war (Line 3) and the other is one of those tabloid entertainment news shows, the ones where typically the word “news” demands air quotes, which compares the breast sizes of two actresses, one in Hollywood, one in India. Why such a comparison merits television, the speaker does not hazard a guess.

The attention then focuses on Lucinda who, despite her tender age, now navigates the mall with the savvy, confident “flounce” (Line 8) of a much older, more seasoned woman. The girl is in her element. Swinging her parents’ credit card in her hand like a “scythe / through the meadows of golden merchandise” (Lines 9-10), Lucinda understands why she is there, what she is charged to do. She is there to shop. The uncle realizes this as well. “Today is the day she stops looking at faces / and starts assessing the labels of purses” (Lines 13-14). Confident, savvy, all too ready for her shopping “journey” (Line 10), Lucinda moves away from her uncle, who observes how she is immersed, “dipped in the dazzling bounty” (Line 15) of the department store.

The speaker/poet, helpless as he watches his niece, draws on the myths of Antiquity to account for the sudden and unexpected conversion of the young girl from a kid into a shopper armed with a credit card and intent now on using it. He compares the dramatic conversion of the girl by drawing first on the Greek myth of the god Apollo and the beautiful nymph Daphne. In that tale, the virgin Daphne pleads with her father, the river god Peneus, to turn her into something, anything, to avoid the unwanted advances of Apollo. Peneus turns his daughter into a beautiful laurel tree. The poet/speaker also draws on the myth of the beautiful Coronis, the daughter of a king, who fled from the god Neptune in an effort to avoid his advances and who was, for her defiance, changed into a black crow by the vengeful goddess Athena.

The realization of his niece’s striking metamorphosis disturbs the speaker/poet. He realizes that Americans, that is those Americans taken in by the suasive lure of their own consumer culture, inevitably, invariably undergo a similar metamorphosis, people turned, sadly, alarmingly, irreversibly into Americans. For the poet/speaker, our very national character is defined by our relentless need to acquire. That hunger, the speaker/poet observes, accounts for the “loneliness” (Line 21) in the American heart. Despite the throngs that crowd America’s uncountable malls and department stores, each American in the end is isolated within the claustrophobic, self-sustaining, self-justifying need for stuff.