SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

presents different definitions of art, collocated with images and historical materials. For
instance, stanza two reads:
Wounded Apollinaire wore a small steel plate
Inserted in his skull. “I so loved art,” he smiled,
“I joined the artillery.” His friends were asked to wait
while his widow laid a crucifix on his chest.
Picasso hated death. The funeral left him so distressed
he painted a self-portrait. “It’s always other people,”
remarked Duchamp, “who do the dying.”
I came. I sat down. I went away.
Because the reader remains unsure how to interpret either “Round” or “Elegy” they present an
atmosphere of language-based playfulness, summed up in the second refrain of the “Elegy”: “I
came. I sat down. I went away.” The remarking of the artists’ words in “Elegy” gives the reader
pleasure without the corresponding demand to make sense of them, making the verse seem
absurd. 14
At the end of the first stanzas of “Round” and of “Elegy” it is clear the reader must abandon all
expectations and beliefs about what poetry is “supposed to do.” Though “Round” appears to
move through time, there is really no unity despite the variations achieved in repetitions. As
the reader seeks information from “Round” it becomes evident that the poem is really about
deconstructing the way poetic meaning is usually grasped, through the form and content
symbiosis. Aptly named, “Round” goes round on itself, enclosing itself narcissistically in its own
language.
Cleverly, Gioia realizes this in the opening line of “Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrains”
when he chooses: “‘Poetry must lead somewhere’ declared Breton.” The stanza then continues:
He carried a rose inside his coat each day
to give a beautiful stranger — “Better to die of love
than love without regret.” And those who loved him
soon learned regret. “The simplest surreal act
is running through the street with a revolver
firing at random.” Old and famous, he seemed demonde.
There is always a skeleton on the buffet.
In the “Elegy,” Gioia captures the sentiment of the Berlin Dadaists that art should produce “‘a
chaotic, explosive image, a provocative dismembering of reality’.” 15 Throughout the poem,
Gioia selected quotations from the surrealists that illustrate this using metaphors of selfdestruction,
“running through the streets with a revolver firing at random”; “My glory is like a
great bomb waiting to explode”; and “ Burn all the books.” The recurring skeleton on the
buffet is more than an image of death and artistic powerlessness; it is absurd in its
“performative effect” as an “artifice” which appears with the companion refrain, “I came. I sat
down. I went away” as an “objective” truth for the poem. 16
The “Elegy”‘s form with its unrhymed stanzas, and occasional metrics, misleads the logic of
poetic form, while emphasizing the ritualistic, mantra like power of certain words, if repeated
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