A Supermarket In California Poem

Poem

"A Supermarket in California" is a poem by American poet Allen Ginsberg first published in Howl and Other Poems in 1956. In the poem, the narrator visits a supermarket in California and imagines finding Federico García Lorca and Walt Whitman shopping.^[1] Whitman, who is too discussed in "Howl", is a graphic symbol mutual in Ginsberg'due south poems, and is often referred to as Ginsberg's poetic model.^[2] "A Supermarket in California", written in Berkeley about a market at University Artery and Grove Street (now Martin Luther King, Jr. Way) in that city^[3] and published in 1956, was intended to be a tribute to Whitman in the centennial twelvemonth of the start edition of Leaves of Grass.^[four]

For its critique of mainstream American culture, the poem is considered to be 1 of the major works of the Beat out Generation, which included other authors of the era such as Jack Kerouac, William Seward Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.^[v] Ginsberg achieved critical success in 1956 with the publication of Howl and Other Poems, with "Howl" being the most popular of the works in the collection. Like "Howl", "A Supermarket in California" was a critique of postwar America, yet in the verse form the narrator focuses more on consumerist aspects of society by contrasting his generation with Whitman'south.^[vi]

The verse form [edit]

"A Supermarket in California" is a prose poem with an irregular format that does not adhere to traditional poetic form including stanza and rhyme scheme. The format is a resemblance of the long-winded attribute of voice communication. The long-line fashion is attributed to Whitman and "as with Whitman, by the time nosotros have traversed the stretch of i of these long lines, we have experienced a rapid set of transformations."^[7] This is shown within the verse form'southward location, the metaphorical supermarket and its symbolism of Ginsberg'south America. The form of Ginsberg's verse form comes from "his knowledge of Walt Whitman'due south long-line style" ^[8] which was an experiment for Ginsberg before he adapted information technology to all his works later on.

In the opening line, the poet addresses Whitman, or Whitman'due south spirit equally he finds himself "shopping for images", which Douglas Allen Burns suggests puts a capitalist spin on the situation described in the poem.^[6] The narrator sees families of consumers shopping in the market aslope the figures of deceased poets Lorca and Whitman, both of whom were homosexual poets similar Ginsberg himself.^[9] The poet notes the sexuality of Whitman as he describes the character equally a "childless, alone old drudge, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys".^[10] Bill Morgan also writes that Ginsberg always saw Whitman every bit a kindred spirit in regards to their similar sexualities, seeing "a self-imposed repression of his innate queerness," which is evident in the poem through its idolization of Whitman.^[11] Betsy Erkkila, in Whitman the Political Poet, suggests that Ginsberg brings Whitman into the poem to show the difference between the America described in the works of Whitman and that which exists in 1955 when "A Supermarket in California" is written. In her opinion, "America" is not described as existence a physical place only one that exists in the imagination of the poet and tin can "live and die only with him".^[12]

Ginsberg introduces the character of Lorca in line 7, request "..and yous, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing downwardly by the watermelons?". Lorca was a famous Spanish poet and playwright who had died in 1936, notwithstanding his spirit appears in the supermarket in 1955 when the poem is written. Lorca's works were often classified equally surrealistic and were considered to have homoerotic tones.^[four]

In the last lines of the poem, Ginsberg turns once again to the image of Whitman, asking:

Ah, dear begetter, greybeard, lone old backbone-

instructor, what America did you take when Charon quit

poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank

and stood watching the boat disappear in the black

waters of Lethe?

In Greek mythology, Charon was the ferryman who carried the dead into the underworld, across the river Styx. The River Lethe was a different river in the underworld, which caused those who drank its waters to feel complete forgetfulness. The shades of the dead were required to drink the waters of the Lethe in order to forget their earthly life.

Critical analysis [edit]

In Story Line, Ian Marshall suggests that the verse form is written to show the differences in American life depicted by Whitman and that which faces Ginsberg in the 1950s: "It's the distance of a century—with Civil War and the 'triumph' of the Industrial Revolution and Darwinism and Freud and ii world wars, mustard gas, and the hydrogen bomb, the advent of the technological era, Vietnam, and IBM."^[13] To Marshall, the verse form is meant to show the change from 19th century optimism to the "ennui" portrayed in Ginsberg'south poems.^[thirteen] Marshall's notion about Ginsberg's portrayal of the evolution of social club is shown inside the lines, "I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas?" ^[14] In Whitman'southward solar day, he would have known the respond to those questions because back and so, ane would go to the farmer directly to get the products unlike the modernistic American supermarkets where one does not know where the products come up from.

Describing the relationship between Ginsberg and Whitman in "Howl" and "A Supermarket in California", Byrne R.S. Fone states that sexuality, specifically homosexuality, plays a key office in the poem's presentation of reality: "Non since Whitman had an American homosexual poet dared to intimate, allow solitary announce, that joy not pain was the result of homosexual rape and to suggest that sex not philosophy might be the virtually powerful weapon against oppression.^[fifteen]" Burns adds that the use of Lorca and Whitman is intended to show the counter-cultural aspects of Ginsberg'southward art. The poesy of Lorca and Whitman, to Burns, express a value organization that contradicts everything the modernistic supermarket represents. Whereas "honey" is what America represents in the works of previous poets, the America of Ginsberg'south poetry is best presented through poetical references to "supermarkets and automobiles".^[xvi]

Critic Nick Selby, in an essay titled "Queer Shoulders to the Bike: Whitman, Ginsberg, and a Bisexual Poetics", suggests that the poem presents sexuality as ane of several opposing forces in the novel. Selby states that the binary opposites of heterosexuality and homosexuality office in the poem in the aforementioned manner as other opposites that make up the major themes of the work: capitalism vs. communism, American vs. Unamerican, and counterculture vs. culture. He adds that Ginsberg ironically uses the setting of the supermarket to show how mainstream civilisation forces conformity upon the consumer, highlighting the "radical sexuality" of the poet and putting it into a broader social context.^[17]

Notes [edit]

^ Bowlby p.196-197
^ Pockell p.168
^ Hollenbach, Lisa (Jul 12, 2018). "Broadcasting "Howl"". Modernism/Modernity. 3 (2). doi:10.26597/mod.0051. S2CID 240404607. Retrieved 21 August 2022.
^ ^a ^b Whitman p. 92
^ Brinnin p.149
^ ^a ^b Burns p.118-119
^ Burns p.333
^ Morgan p.206
^ Burns p. nineteen
^ Ginsberg. p.29
^ Morgan p.222
^ Erkkila p.189
^ ^a ^b Marshall p.160
^ Ginsberg p.29
^ Fone p.706
^ Burns p.19
^ Selby 1997 pp.126-128

References [edit]

Bowlby, Rachel. Carried Away: The Invention of Mod Shopping. "A Supermarket in California". Columbia Academy Press 2002
Pockell, Leslie. The 100 Best Poems of All Fourth dimension. Warner Books 2001
Burns, Allan Douglas. Thematic Guide to American Poetry. Greenwood Publishing Grouping 2002
Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. "A Supermarket in California". Ed. William Carlos Williams. City Lights Books 2000
Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. Oxford Academy Press US, 1996
Whitman, Walt. and Ezra Greenspan. Walt Whitman'due south "Song of myself". Routledge 2005
Marshall, Ian.Story Line. Academy of Virginia Press (1998)
Fone, Byrne R. S. The Columbia Album of Gay Literature. Columbia University Press 2001
Brinnin, John Malcolm, Bill Read, Rollie McKenna. The Modern Poets. Academy of California Press 2007
Selby, Nick. "Queer Shoulders to the Cycle:Whitman, Ginsberg, and a Bisexual Poetics". The Bisexual Imaginary: Representation, Identity and Desire. Continuum 1997
Morgan, Bill. "I Celebrate Myself: the somewhat private life of Allen Ginsberg". New York: Penguin Grouping 2006.
Burns, Glen. "Great Poets Howl: A Written report of Allen's Ginsberg's Poetry, 1943-1955" New York 1983.