Allen Ginsberg - A Supermarket in California Lyrics. Will we walk all night through solitary streets? What peaches and what penumbras! It is here that the speaker is setting up a division between himself and other Americans. While Whitman’s work spans a wide array of texts, undoubtedly his most celebrated is the 1956 collection of poetry Howl and Other Poems. On a side note, both Ginsberg and Garcia Lorca were also gay, which is perhaps why Ginsberg makes mention of the other poets in this work. Each word connects either the poet’s past or Whitman’s life. In the following essay, Semansky characterizes “A Supermarket in California” as a lament about the materialistic, spiritually vapid culture of mid-twentieth-century America that underscores the inherent conflict embodied in living in an advanced capitalist country and the emotional and psychologically devastating effects of such conflict. He has a passion for poetry and enjoys analysing and providing interpretations for poetry from the past and present. A Supermarket in California Today Allen Ginsberg is regarded as one of the 20th century’s seminal Beat poets. He is most known for his poem “Howl,” which got him in a bit of hot water for its subversive themes. Follow @genius on Twitter for updates The poet uses lots of enjambment in the poem. Last but not the least, the theme of cultural consciousness is present in these lines, “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home/ to our silent cottage?”. He jumps out of his illusory world to present the realistic scenes of the supermarket. In the second half of the second stanza, the speaker admits to following Whitman around the store. There are also families shopping together—the husbands are in the aisles while the wives are in the avocados and the babies are in the tomatoes. 495.0453 School Cash Register Receipts Program. Annotation 495.0453 (a) IN GENERAL—DEFINITION. !function(t,e,r){var n,s=t.getElementsByTagName(e)[0],i=/^http:/.test(t.location)? Please log in again. The third and final stanza has an almost forlorn feeling to it: the speaker knows it is getting late and the store will be closing soon. According to Michael Meyer 1 poetry in fixed verse “can be compared to the regular figures of classical ballet, free verse to the variable movements of modern dance, whose patterns are very flexible but nevertheless follow a choreography”.. The speaker ends the poem, wondering if he and Whitman will walk around and dream of the past and of “the lost America.”. Prev Article Next Article. Allen Ginsberg wrote “A Supermarket in California” while living in Berkeley, California in 1955. Allen Ginsberg uses his poetic imagination to invoke the spirits of Walt Whitman and Garcia Lorca in the poem. There is an allusion to Whitman’s magnum opus in the use of Homer’s Odyssey in the poem. In this supermarket of the mind, the poet can select images and inspirations much as one would search for items on a grocery list. In this parenthetical, it's almost as if the speaker is stepping out of himself and acknowledging the fact that it's totally weird that he's dream-shoplifting with Walt Whitman in a California supermarket. 1722 Words7 Pages Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California" Presented much like a spontaneous journal or diary entry, Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California" is a complex and multifaceted poem that stands as an indictment against American government and culture. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! This poem is a tribute to Walt Whitman in the centennial year of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman predicted in his writing that society would become overcome by industrialization in the future and move further and further away from nature. "A Supermarket in California" is a poem by American poet Allen Ginsberg first published in Howl and Other Poems in 1956. The symbolic use of words like “hungry fatigue”, “neon fruit supermarket” and “solitary fancy” makes this poem interesting. It is the use of metonymy. He writes, “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.” In the next line, the speaker continues to talk to Whitman, telling him that in his “hungry fatigue,” he entered a supermarket to shop not for food, but images. In this supermarket of the mind, the poet can select images and inspirations much as one would search for items on a grocery list. He admits that he feels “absurd” that he’s been touching the poet’s book and dreaming of their odyssey in the grocery store. Curiously, Ginsberg uses so many exclamation points here, an uncommon punctuation mark in poetry. ‘A Supermarket in California’ by Allen Ginsberg is a poem following the model of prose. By using the word “enumerations”, the poet refers to the works of Walt Whitman. The description of the poet walking with Whitman in the third stanza is also clear in these lines, “Will we walk all night through solitary streets? He talks with them, even walks side by side in the supermarket. I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the. A Supermarket in California, another favorite among Ginsberg fans, was published in his book Howl and Other Poems in 1956. Ginsberg clearly draws a line between him and the people living in suburban America with their “blue automobiles.”. Ads are what helps us bring you premium content! The long sentence is not a mark of conventional poetry. The doors close in an hour. Here is an analysis of the poem A Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg, one of the leaders of the Beat Generation. “America” by Claude McKay is a traditional English rhyming sonnet, consisting of three quatrains and a couplet written in iambic pentameter. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! In the poem, the narrator visits a supermarket in California and imagines finding Federico García Lorca and Walt Whitman shopping. What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked Down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking There is an air of superiority in ‘A Supermarket in California’, and with its many allusions, Ginsberg assumes his readers will have a certain prior knowledge of subjects such as poetry, world history, and mythology. //