In the first stanza of Ginsberg’s poem, “A Supermarket in California,” he opens with addressing Walt Whitman, the famous 19th century poet. Ginsberg walks under the full moon and then, “shopping for images,” enters a supermarket and thinks of Whitman’s enumerations. Enumerations are defined as “the action of mentioning a number of things one by one,” by Oxford Language. Whitman was known for listing things in his poems, as illustrated by “Song of Myself.” Ginsberg then lists in a similar way the peaches, avocados, babies, and then to the watermelons, where, oddly enough, Garcia Lorca, the poet who wrote “An Ode to Walt Whitman,” is standing.
In the second stanza of “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg follows Whitman throughout the aisles of the grocery store as he is “eyeing the grocery boys,” and asking them questions, such as “Are you my Angel?” Ginsberg also notices that while he follows Whitman, the store detective follows him. A store detective is an employee of the store responsible for preventing theft. At the close of the second stanza, Ginsberg points out that neither Whitman nor he ever passed the cashier. I can not place the meaning of the phrase “in our solitary fancy tasting arti / chokes.” Historically, artichokes are meant to represent hope and prosperity but it could also be simply that artichokes were the en vogue vegetable of that time, much like the avocados of today.
In the final stanza, Ginsberg again opens with an invocation to Whitman as he asks, “Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does / your beard point tonight?” This stanza feels the closest to true Whitmanian prose with the images of solitary streets, silent cottages, and Charon, the ferryman of the dead according to Greek myth. The poem concludes with a direct prayer to Whitman, who Ginsberg calls “dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher.” Ginsberg beseeches him to tell Ginsberg of Whitman’s America, the “lost America of love,” but Whitman does not answer.
Dr. George Monteiro, a late professor of English and Portuguese at Brown University wrote, “Peaches and penumbras: Ginsberg’s “Supermarket in California” in 2006 for Notes on Contemporary Literature. Monteiro points out the similarities between “A Supermarket in California,” by Allen Ginsberg and “An Ode to Walt Whitman,” by Garcia Lorca. In both poems, Whitman serves as a sort of Virgil to Dante character or as Monteiro says, “The narrator’s guide in this paradisal journey is Walt Whitman, famous for his lists and enumerations.” Later, Monteiro points out the similarities between the timeline of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” Lorca’s “An Ode to Walt Whitman,” and Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California.”
As summarized, Poe follows a stranger through a crowd to discover “the secret of crime,” the following of Whitman by Lorca through New York, and the following of Ginsberg by the store detective, all of them “deviants” and criminals. Dr. Monteiro finishes by stating, “Just as Whitman is invoked by Lorca in his nightmarish vision of New York, so, too, Whitman serves as Ginsberg’s guide… In their solitary seasons, poets like Crane, Ginsberg, and Lorca call on poets of the past for comfort and reassurance, but mainly for company, investing deeply in their virtual presence.”
While Dr. Monteiro does an adequate job of bringing all the players involved in the poem together for the student of literature to understand, he pauses at driving home the real connection between Whitman, Lorca, and Ginsberg, all of whom were as openly gay as possible in their respective eras. I agree with his assessment that Whitman is considered a guide for both Lorca and Ginsberg, however, I think he ignores that they both look to him as a sort of ancestor. To Whitman, many gay poets, including Oscar Wilde, looked to as a sort of icon in the same way that the youths of today look to Jonathan Bailey, Matt Bomer, and Ben Aldridge.
In Lorca’s poem “An Ode to Walt Whitman,” the anti-gay f-word is used five or six times as a reclaiming, a declaration that this word that was used to shame in now owned by the gay community. Lorca details his imagined walk with Whitman through New York City saying,
New York, mire,
New York, mire and death.
What angel is hidden in your cheek?
Whose perfect voice will sing the truths of wheat?
Who, the terrible dream of your stained anemones?
Not for a moment, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies,
nor your corduroy shoulders frayed by the moon,
nor your thighs pure as Apollo’s,
nor your voice like a column of ash,
old man, beautiful as the mist,
you moaned like a bird
with its sex pierced by a needle.
Enemy of the satyr,
enemy of the vine,
and lover of bodies beneath rough cloth…
(Lorca, “An Ode to Walt Whitman”)
Lorca makes Whitman a desired sex symbol. Ginsberg looks upon him as a sort of grandfatherly, slightly demented and lovable ancestor. Both look to Whitman for direction on how to be a gay man in America. By ignoring that Lorca and Ginsberg are both asking Whitman to guide them through their respective settings as gay men, Dr. Monteiro cripples his argument and is therefore, despite his many accomplishments, not a relevant critic on these series of poems.
Discussion Questions:
- Is it possible to accurately read a poem without knowing the context of the world around the poet?
- Is the censored reading of the past a sign that the reviewer (i.e. Dr. Monteiro) is prejudiced or is it more a signal of the sign of the times?
I think your critique of the article here is absolutely right. Ginsberg is creating a clear queer genealogy in this poem, and Llorca is such a fitting figure to join that lineage especially in such a tragic poem. Llorca often wrote of what he called duende, which is a kind of powerful tragic force bordering on the ecstatic.
Both of these poets also frame Whitman as a sort of prophet of an American or a world that is no longer possible. This adds a layer of tragedy to both poems. I hope we have a chance to look more deeply at this poem in class discussion.