Counting The Traditions: A New Formalistic Reading Of Dana Gioia's Narrative Poem Counting The Children

Counting the Children, a narrative poem by the chief member of the "New Formalist" poet Dana Gioia (1950- ), invites speculation on familial responsibility and immortality in the narration of the protagonist's nightmare of losing his child. Nonetheless, the poem with its full metaphors in characters and event serves as a parable of Gioia's traditionalism of creating the mid-length narratives in Frostian style.The protagonist of the narrative is a Chinese-American accountant, Mr. Choi. When sent to audit the estate of a single old woman recently dead, he was shocked to find a dim room stuffed with all kinds of dolls which the old woman collected from trash and put in order. That summoned a nightmare of Mr. Choi, in which he could not settle the account anyhow and seemed interrogated by his generations of ancestors, and as a terrible result his daughter would die because of his inability. Roused from the nightmare, Mr. Choi hurried into his daughter's room. Watching his sleeping daughter, he realized in a vision that the eternal circularity of birth-and-death in a family is beyond one's control, and the immortality is tantalizing.Mr. Choi's terror of losing his child is a metaphor of Gioia's deep worry about the narrative tradition being rejected. Gioia is afraid that the narrative tradition would be thrown into the trash of poetry by a collective unconsciousness after the age of Modernism. As terror is always attended by love, Mr. Choi's love for his child resembles Gioia's personal taste for traditional narratives. Gioia dislikes the modern epic composed of short lyrics, which he deems as the room of the collected dolls, isolated from general people and finally abandoned. He appreciates Frost, Jeffers, etc, the American poets in the early twentieth century, who wrote narratives with the inheritance of Wordsworth and Browning. As a Chinese descendant, Mr. Choi attached great importance to continuing the family line. Likewise, a "New Formalist" as Gioia ought to have a deep historical sense of poetic genres. As Mr. Choi perceived the familial immortality, Gioia proposes that poets take the responsibility of inheriting the narrative tradition and getting its rebirth as "children" of one generation after another.Unlike Mr. Choi left himself lamenting for personal helplessness and fatal determinacy, Gioia has found his identity in developing the narrative tradition. Following Frostian style, Gioia advocates a mid-length narrative with lyric intensity and metric regulations. Based on this, Counting the Children is composed of tercets in prosaic blank verse, which recalls traditional meter and Dante's stanza. To further the virtues of form, Gioia makes the consummate interplay of meter and rhythm with rhetorical variation. And dramatic monologue, which consists of almost the total narrative, serves effectively for characterization and meanwhile condenses the plot. The lyrical mode is not rendered to the poet's natural outburst of his mourning emotion even then he was suffering from his first son's death. Rather Gioia had recomposed the poem, with his recovery from deep sorrow, to illustrate a certain intellectual and moral problem of inheritance and innovation in a fictional narrative.The mid-length narrative represented by Gioia's Counting the Children provides a practicable strategy for the "New Formalist" poetry, and establishes the centrality of narrative to the "New Formalism" which aims at the revival of traditional forms. Since narrative constructs a self-contained context, it is capable of preventing the lyrical element from the over self-referential, and making poetry competent to cover a wide variety of literary materials and attract a multiple levels of readership to participate. Further, this model of narrative, which insists on the applications of traditional meter and manageable subjects in mid-length, has become a modest but fruitful proposal to continue the narrative tradition, and meanwhile played a part in reversing the homogeneity of readership and the monotony of genres influenced by the institutionalization of contemporary American poetics.