The first two things that are immediately apparent in Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California” both relate to form. One is that the lines are long, with no stanza, if the groups of lines may be called that before each break, shorter than two actual lines on the page. In fact, upon editing this close reading, I found that the “stanzas” are labeled as a single, individual line, and had to adjust my citations accordingly. The other is that the breaks are left indented, but each stanza is left-justified, giving the poem a prose-like appearance. This prose-like appearance gives the poem a conversational tone, addressed to Walk Whitman, as seen in the first stanza: “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked/down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious look-/ing at the full moon” (1). Interestingly enough, Ginsberg uses his commas in a proper grammatical context, with his address to Walt Whitman sectioned off with two commas, but his phrase “a headache self-conscious look/ing at the full moon” is both a bizarre phrase when taken at face grammatical value (a “headache self-conscious looking” turns “headache” into an adjective) and, when coupled with the enjambment that occurs mid-word with “looking,” indicates that the speaker is conversational, but perhaps in a nervous manner (to be addressing one of the “fathers” of American poetry). Too, the breakup of “looking” keeps in line with the prose-like paragraph form of the poem as a whole.
The third stanza contains a series of images that seem to stun the speaker, with each sentence punctuated by an exclamation point: “What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at/night! Aisles full of husbands!” (3). When juxtaposed with Walt Whitman himself appearing (perhaps, or maybe just in the speaker’s mind), and Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet who may or may not have been assassinated, “down by the watermelons,” the brash images of consumerism stand in stark contrast to the salt-of-the-earth poets named.
As the speaker moves throughout the store, three things stand out, the first of which is that the speaker does not actually confront Whitman. Instead, the speaker “wander[s] in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following [Whitman]” (6). If we take the speaker to be a poet (if not the poet), then the speaker may be suggesting they cannot actually come close to Whitman’s poetry or persona, instead only able to follow, or that they are reluctant to approach such a giant of literature. Immediately following is the speaker’s comment that he pretends to be “followed in [his] imagination by the store detective” (6). It is hard to not read this line as biographical, considering Ginsberg’s numerous brushes with the law, it adds for the speaker to the excitement of following in Whitman’s footsteps, to imagine that someone else is following him with a shadowy motive. The third thing that stands out is that before leaving the store and questioning what he will do with Whitman next, the speaker, in a parenthetical aside, mentions: “(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket/and feel absurd)” (9). The speaker has been self-conscious since the first line, as the speaker himself tells us, but at this point the ridiculousness becomes so overwhelming that the speaker shifts from his make-believe in the grocery store to wistful but hypothetical wonderings that are yet to be.
At this point the speaker asks if Walt Whitman will join him, moving from observations of Whitman to full-fledged companionship, as the singular becomes the plural: “Will we walk…/we’ll both…will we stroll…/our silent cottage” (10-11). Unless the paradox is true in the phrase “we’ll both be lonely,” (10), the speaker wants to walk with Whitman “dreaming of the lost America of love past blue auto-/mobiles in driveways” (10), another juxtaposition of Whitman, who sang loudly and nakedly in the river in his poems, to the poet’s contemporary society in which there are driveways, each lined with a seemingly identical piece of mass-produced machinery.
The last line in the poem contains a direct allusion to Charon, the boatman of the classical Greek rivers of the underworld. Charon apparently gave a ride to Whitman across the river, which suggests the literal interpretation that Whitman is dead, although it could also suggest that Whitman was heroic enough to have been among the chosen few heroes to actually cross while still alive, a la Hercules or Orpheus. Alive or dead, however, Whitman cannot do more than watch the ferryman leave him behind, crossing “the black waters of Lethe” (12), suggesting perhaps that urban, cosmopolitan, and consumerist America has forgotten Whitman and what made his poetry sing.
Is it possible to disentangle Ginsberg from the speaker in this poem? Our supplementary readings have warned of this biographical approach to the Beats; does it strengthen or weaken our understanding of the poem? Word count notwithstanding, I was reluctant to comment on the implicit (or possibly even explicit) homosexual/homoerotic content of the poem, as I thought that would lean too much towards the biographical (Whitman/Ginsberg/Lorca).
Bonus! Reading “Sunflower Sutra” line-by-line in a single breath each, I was hauntingly reminded of Eminem’s “Campaign Speech” and “Stan,” neither of which I’m comfortable linking here (due to their extremely explicit and/or dark nature), but are worth listening to purely for the rhythmic qualities that are, however strangely, reminiscent of Ginsberg’s approach to writing.
No comments yet.