22 pages • 44 minutes read
At the Galleria Shopping Mall
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Wild Iris” by Louise Glück (1992)
No poet was more formidable in shaping Hoagland’s development as a poet than his mentor at the University of Iowa, Louise Glück. The influence, however, was one of evolution from rather than imitation of. Here, the poem, at once bleak and unsettling in excavating the pain of the poet’s emotional suffering over the contemplation of the absolute experience of death, reveals Glück’s existential take on the implications of mortality, a typical ignition experience for Confessional poets. For Hoagland, such Confessional poets represented a critical starting off place for his own evolution as a poet—for Hoagland fixating on the individual angst of the poet inevitably locked poetry into self-defeating pessimism. It would be Hoagland’s work to place such a sensitive, feeling, contemplative poet within the larger culture.
“A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg (1956)
Hoagland often read bits of this poem to his audiences at his readings, finding in Ginsberg’s rollicking, broad vision a complement to his own sense that a poet takes the measure of a culture. In addition, Hoagland studied the subtle ways that Ginsberg’s apparently reckless free verse in fact created the kind of sonic interplay typical of the jazz music Ginsberg’s generation engaged. Hoagland was born too late to be a Beat, but with his embrace of the Eastern wisdom of engaging the flow of the moment and its rejection of crass materialism, Hoagland brought that gospel message to his fin-de-millennium. He relished the subtle free verse music of Ginsberg, and here Ginsberg provides an early assertion of Hoagland’s own fears that America is at its heart surrendering to the emotional and spiritual emptiness of materialism.
“This Be the Verse” by Philip Larkin (1971)
A contemporary of Auden’s and one Hoagland admired, Philip Larkin explored British post-war culture with the keen eye of a social critic. Drawing on his own admiration for Auden, another of Hoagland’s influences, Larkin saw in poetry a strategy for critiquing his society and its flaws, most notably here its crass materialism, its rapidly diminishing attention span, its abandoning of culture and its grim surrender to the inhumanity of technology. This short poem, which Hoagland often used in his readings, reflects on how the younger generation apes the cultural and social attitudes of the parent generation, creating an inevitable spiral into ever worsening cultural profile, which Hoagland riffs in his account of his young niece and her confidence in the mall.
Further Literary Resources
“Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment” by Tony Hoagland (2006)
A prolific essayist on the craft of poetry—his own and others—Hoagland here addresses how a poet routinely upcycles moments that seem frankly unworthy of poetic capture. He looks at many of his far more experimental contemporaries and diagnoses what he defines as their apparent (and for Hoagland inexplicable) fear of storytelling. They intellectualize poetry. They prefer elitist poetry that gives their poetry little real-time context. They use poetry as an opportunity to indulge gimmicky formal constructs. Hoagland argues here that the real-time world regularly delights the poet open to such miraculous moments and that in sharing those moments the poet bonds with a reader in ways those other poets cannot.
“Tony Hoagland and Second Thoughts” by Mark Halliday (2018)
Because Hoagland’s poems were often dismissed as pedestrian, the argument here is critical: Hoagland’s poems reward re-reading. Published shortly before Hoagland’s death, the article investigates how Hoagland, despite his deceptively inviting and accessible prosody, developed his poetry around meditations (or second thoughts) about moments that at the time seemed remarkably unremarkable. Watching a woman in a theater struggle to keep her bra strap up, stirring batter for cranberry muffins, sitting next to an umbrella abandoned on a plane—each moment recrystallizes into a poem that draws from such moments unexpected insight. In turn, Hoagland’s readers revisit his poems and come to see the argument that lurks beneath the conversational and off-the-cuff style.
“Due Consideration: On the Real Sophistication of Tony Hoagland” by Benjamin Paloff (2007)
The article confronts the long-held critical establishment’s too-easy dismissal of Hoagland as a minor poet, his poetic gifts squandered on subjects that lack the gravitas of poetry. Using copious quotes from Hoagland himself on his own influences and his own diligent crafting and recrafting of his lines, the article argues that the most sophisticated kind of poetry is poetry that appears unsophisticated. The article dissects numerous lines of Hoagland’s apparent artless poems and scans out his subtle sense of quiet rhythms, which Hoagland drew from his conversion to Buddhism and the Eastern concept of chanting or using recurring vowels to create an ambience that Hoagland would capture in his very popular readings at colleges and poetry festivals.
Listen to the Poem
Surprisingly, given its conversational vernacular voice and its sly humor and its use of pop culture, “At the Galleria” has eluded being recorded. However, two videos, both available on YouTube, provide context for the poem and for Hoagland. One, available through Vimeo, is a recording of Hoagland’s reading at Arizona State University shortly after the publication of the volume that contained “At the Galleria.” Although he does not read that poem, his recitation (and his droll commentary in between) provides a guide to how to read his poetry. The other is a more developed lecture from 2017 (Hoagland himself is clearly struggling with cancer) in which Hoagland discusses voice in poetry using several of his poems and others, among them Glück, which influenced him. He articulates the challenge of creating a poetic voice that does not seem like a poetic voice.
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