Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Plot Summary of “A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg. This study guide for Allen Ginsberg's A Supermarket in California offers summary and analysis on themes, symbols, and other literary devices found in the text. Source: Tyrus Miller, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. But the churches were not selling salvation as much as they were exhorting people to believe in themselves. “Confession is not enough,” he remarks, “and neither is the assumption that the truth of one’s experience will emerge if only one can keep talking long enough in a whipped-up state of excitement. “A Supermarket in California” investigates the historical relationship that poets have had to society. This is also borne out by the imagery, which is surreal or dream-like. In “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg is using imagery to give the reader a way of being there thus creating an emotional attachment to the idea of loneliness. Whitman, for his part, acts almost like an alien placed on Earth from outer space; the supermarket environment doesn't make sense to his 19th-century perspective. Moreover, even the “representative” poets Whitman and Lorca are themselves now only ghosts, and their claim to be the voice of their people rests solely on the ability of their poetry to compel conviction in later readers and writers such as Ginsberg. (Ginsberg, 6-10). Ginsberg also pays homage to another influence in “A Supermarket,” Garcia Lorca. The poem “A Supermarket in California” was written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955. A Supermarket in California Summary. "A Supermarket in California" is a poem by Allen Ginsberg, one of the foremost poets of mid-20th century America. He uses words as if he were shopping, to … Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California" Literary Analysis 1669 Words | 7 Pages. Think about the relationship between your dreams and your waking life. Should I buy the Post-Toasties or the Cocoa Puffs? It just does.”, In his The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century, Michael Davidson focuses on the subtext of “A Supermarket in California,” charging that Whitman functions as an alter ego for Ginsberg “who himself is ‘self-conscious’ and ‘shopping for images.’” Viewing the poem as a statement on Ginsberg’s own sexual alienation, Davidson writes that Ginsberg’s evocation of Whitman “emphasizes that this loneliness is also the historical loneliness of the homosexual who is denied the opportunity to participate in the bounty of ‘normal’ American life.”. The second stanza places Walt Whitman, the nineteenth-century, American poet who celebrated America’s spiritual unity, in modern America—in that same supermarket—to explore what has become of the American Dream in the twentieth century. These vices have continued to persist in the contemporary world. A Supermarket in California Themes Literature and Writing The speaker spends pretty much all of "A Supermarket in California" talking to Walt Whitman, the long-dead super important American poet. ... passing the cashier. For Ginsberg, this place prompts a sense of loneliness, as well as nostalgia, for Whitman’s expansive and all-embracing vision of America. Read this phrase from Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California." The first of the three ultimate lines sets these effects side-by-side and thus allow us to see how Ginsberg, with great skill, makes them converge in the long concluding line. — A valuable resource on Ginsberg's literary hero from the Poetry Foundation. That Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 is significant as a response to the increasing anxiety Americans had about religion and the place (or lack of it) in their lives. At the end of the poem he states: “Everyone knew they were part of ‘History’ except the deceased / who never knew exactly what was happening even when I was alive.” Perhaps he did not know “exactly what was happening,” but he certainly had the keen ability to comment on the times. 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 wrote another one of his famous poems called A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley on the same day as that of writing A Supermarket in California.In both the poems he tried using the long line form, inspired by his poetic mentor, Walt Whitman. Two-ply or four? He finds only solitary roles left to fill: the late-night shopper, ... the American poet without an audience.”. This takes the theme of the speaker’s adoration of Whitman to new heights. On the Edge: A New History of 20th-century America, edited by David A. Horowitz, Peter N. Carroll, and David D. Lee, Los Angeles: West Publishing Co., 1990. Ginsberg has taken Whitman’s spacious poetry of the outdoors and thrust it back indoors. The free-verse form allows for the free association of ideas. In “A Supermarket in California,” Allen Ginsberg uses the American supermarket as an extended metaphor for a poet’s mind and experiences. In the first stanza, Ginsberg summons Whitman into his thoughts during a moonlit stroll to relieve the pain of self-reflection. Poetry for Students. The poem ends with an image of Whitman in the underworld, suggesting that Whitman's idealistic and romantic vision of America is probably already dead. FURT…, Clifton, Lucille 1936– Levitt eventually perfected his system so that he could put up a house every sixteen minutes. The poem is part description, part meditation, and part lament, and its associative logic is more akin to a daydream. Whereas Whitman’s best-known poetry takes place amidst the populous bustle of Manhattan, along the open road, or at the ocean side, Ginsberg’s setting is far more humble, even suburban: the large-chain grocery store. Yet unlike Whitman’s individuals, among these strangely glowing vegetables and pork chops there are only two individualized figures, and they both are the ghosts of dead gay poets: the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, killed by fascists during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, and Walt Whitman. Berkeley, 1955. Mottram, Eric, Allen Ginsberg in the Sixties, Brighton, England: Unicorn Bookshop, 1972. Situating himself in a long tradition of visionary poetry, Ginsberg makes Whitman his guide into the spaces of the dead, just as centuries earlier Dante had taken the Latin poet Virgil as his guide through hell in the Divine Comedy. Written in 1955, “A Supermarket in California” appeared the next year in Howl and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg’s controversial and groundbreaking book of verse that is often credited with initiating the Beat movement. The free-verse form allows for the free association of ideas. Ginsberg’s guide in this poem is Whitman, the “lonely old courage teacher,” whom he follows through the supermarket and then “through solitary streets.”, It is significant that although others have noticed techniques and poetic devices that Ginsberg uses, he himself has denied any conscious intention to use these techniques and devices. At the beginning of “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg introduces himself as pondering this magnificent democratic vista of poetry and later as holding a volume of Whitman’s poetry. ." The supermarket itself was a relatively new entity in 1950s America, as mom-and-pop grocery stores and other small food stores closed because they were unable to compete with well-capitalized chain stores. (January 13, 2021). AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY He uses strong imagery to allow the reader to get a strong sense of the atmosphere. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. Do I hate it? An intelligent assessment of Ginsberg’s place among Beat writers and poets. "A Supermarket in California" is a poem by Allen Ginsberg, one of the foremost poets of mid-20th century America. The boat disappears on the Lethe, the underworld’s river of forgetfulness. Once in the house, you needed entertainment, and by 1957 Americans owned more than forty million television sets. Charon is the elderly boatman in Greek mythology who ferried the souls of the recently dead cross the river Lethe to the underworld. 1951: The first coaxial cable linked East Coast and West Coast, enabling all Americans to see the same television program at the same time. The subtle idea in these lines is the connection, again, between the supermarket and spiritual food. Teachers and parents! A Supermarket in California. Ginsberg on Rimbaud of pure spirit without body, is a kind of false label put on a much earthier desire of the body. But by looking for his poetic inspiration in a commercial setting, Ginsberg underscores one of the themes of his poem: the reduction of every thing and thought in America to something that can be bought and sold. Instead, his final conclusion is that modern humanity is no longer able to see the history of a particular object, fruit being his example. On April 21, 1967, Harvey Cox wrote “An Open Letter to Allen Ginsberg” in the Catholic weekly, The emergence of gay communities is detailed in John D’Emilio’s. Readers are meant to compare Whitman’s vision of plenty in America with the much more contained and less natural world that Ginsberg now observes. STYLE It has since…, Curse In its place is a world of personal identification through consumerism and conformity, of “blue automobiles in driveways.” This complacent suburban ideal has little to offer a radical and highly individualistic thinker such as Ginsberg. 80-81. This demonstrates how the laws of the market (buying and paying for food) become the laws of our conscience and determine not only how we think about the world outside of us, but how we think about ourselves as well. Introduction Trying to figure out if he is just a tool for portrayl (an outsider) or if he is really living this life too (an insider). STYLE 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 following Whitman, Ginsberg imagines that he himself is being followed by store detectives. In the opening stanza we see the speaker walking alone under trees, “looking at the full moon.” This peace and solitude affords him the opportunity to dream, which he does, of “a neon fruit supermarket.” By setting the poem in a supermarket, Ginsberg zeroes in on what is almost an embarrassment of riches and choice in the industrialized Western world; by using the adjectives “neon fruit,” Ginsberg underscores the gaudy aspect of so much conspicuous consumption, perhaps even punning on his own sexuality (“fruit” being a derogatory term for a homosexual). The audience for “A Supermarket in California” is complicated in that the speaker is addressing both Walt Whitman—or at least an idea of who Whitman was (his ghost)—and a public that is (ostensibly) sympathetic to the poet’s feelings about America. “Beat” is a term coined by writer Jack Kerouac to mean both “beat down” and “beatitude.” It was meant to describe the dissatisfaction and spiritual exhaustion of a generation that came of age during the 1940s and 1950s. That both poets taste freely of the store’s delicacies without having to pay highlights Ginsberg’s own fantasy that he can be different (both poetically and socially) and not have to pay the consequences. POEM SUMMARY — Further reading of poems by Ginsberg, and useful essays too. Coming a hundred years after Whitman, Ginsberg is inspired by the bard’s vision of a vigorously democratic America sung by a new, public poetry. 199-230. Additionally, “A Supermarket” also alludes to a hidden sexualized world, veiled in the language of commonplace things. More Episodes from Audio Poem of the Day. He believed in poetry of the people, not the professoriate.” Ginsberg was what Whitman always wanted to be—a poet of the people. Encyclopedia.com. Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California” was one of the “other poems” in this publication, seemingly a tribute to Ginsberg’s poetic hero and influence, Walt Whitman. As in most of Ginsberg’s poems, the speaker is Ginsberg himself (rather than a poetic persona), and he uses the supermarket as a metaphoric setting for dreaming about the possibilities that America offers and lamenting the country it has instead become. McGrath, Charles, “Street Singer,” New York Times Book Review, April 27, 1997, p. 43. This takes the theme of the speaker’s adoration of Whitman to new heights. Davidson, Michael, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. From this excerpt, it can best be inferred that the speaker is Howard, Richard, “Allen Ginsberg,” Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950, New York: Atheneum, 1980, pp. Insanity: Ginsberg is torn between two different realities. The poems in Leaves of Grass describe America and the diversity of individuals who make up the idea of America. This time was instrumental in the development of Ginsberg’s poetic voice, which was heavily influenced by Blake and Walt Whitman and attempted to break down the barriers between poetry and religion, religion and being. - opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression. Ginsberg organizes his sentences into three stanzas of increasing length (three, then four, then five sentences). Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999. Allen Ginsberg, as a beat was somewhat of a social rights activist, and looked up to Walt Whitman for his free style of writing and open sexuality. Dream visions were a poetic form widely employed by medieval poets. 13 Jan. 2021 . Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe? Whole families shopping at night! Ginsberg also taps into the tradition of the Modernists he admired, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, who advocated concrete expression of images to capture the moments of experience. What thoughts I ... A good part of the poem’s popularity can be traced to its brevity and its themes. In the last stanza, the poet uses the theme of cultural consciousness. were also buying spirituality, as they returned to churches in record numbers, partly as an attempt to establish some sense of community or belonging that they had lost as they lived further and further away from centers of social activity. “In each case the needed equipment is very simple,” Dickey says, “a life, with its memories, frustrations, secret wishes ... an ability to write elementary prose and to supply it with rather more exclamation points than might normally be called for.” Dickey goes on to question Ginsberg’s approach toward poetry itself. 22-41. A Supermarket in California is a poem by American poet Allen Ginsberg first published in Howl and Other Poems in 1956. The last question and line of the poem, which directly addresses Whitman as a wise and aged figure, requires readers to take a deep breath and sigh along with Ginsberg: “Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?” In Greek mythology, Charon was the aged boatman charged with the responsibility of ferrying the souls of the deceased to Hades, the god of death. Breslin, James E., “Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl,’” From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. The very setting of the poem emphasizes this dilemma. These contradictions, while illustrating the speaker’s conflict, are also a staple of surrealist verse. In his poem, "A Supermarket in California," Ginsberg goes into a supermarket to try and find the natural beauty of the fruits and vegetables there. Ginsberg’s world may have been far removed from Whitman’s, yet the two shared the kind of poetic perspective necessary to comment on their time. Which way does your beard point tonight?” Ginsberg is troubled and looking to Whitman for answers at the end of this poem. This line and the one that follows speak to the influence that Whitman has had on Ginsberg and to the controversial reputation of both poets. 1988: Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street detailed the relationship between a wealthy corporate takeover artist and a materialistic young stockbroker, both of whom are caught violating securities trading laws. Which way does your beard point tonight?” Even as he raises this serious question, however, he doubts whether he can justifiably use the heightened poetic rhetoric of the visionary tradition. Ginsberg the speaker finds solace in imagining how other poets would respond to the crass materialism of twentieth-century America. The Reverend Norman Vincent Peale’s best-seller, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), exemplifies the kind of “new” evangelism that postwar affluence engendered. One of Ginsberg’s most frequently anthologized shorter poems, “A Supermarket in California” not only acknowledges Ginsberg’s debt to Whitman’s vision of America as a place of possibility and abundance, but also allows Ginsberg to place himself (more explicitly) in a tradition of gay writers. The poem ends on a profoundly unsettling and questioning note: What America, Ginsberg asks his great predecessor in the final line, was left to you to turn into poetic myth when the last spark of your consciousness was extinguished by death? Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Whitman’s beard metaphorically functions as a moral compass, suggesting that America will or will not heed the imperative to change. Allen Ginsberg “A Supermarket in California” is both an ode to Ginsberg’s poetic hero and major influence, Walt Whitman.Walt Whitman was an early influence in Ginsberg poetry. In the beginning of the poem, the image you get is Ginsberg walking down the street, under trees and a full moon. He does this by imagining both Whitman and Lorca in a California supermarket, literally a place of material abundance. In "A supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg, he uses symbolism and literary allusions to convey a man going through a crisis between the modern American consumerism, an individual's detachment with nature; following the ways of his idol Walt Whitman by living a spiritual natural lifestyle and also tell a story about his search for sexual acceptance among the society for homosexuals. In addition, the internet allows almost instantaneous transmission of data over phone lines and cable worldwide. Kerouac’s prose celebrated sexual freedom and the possibility to do what you wanted when you wanted. The primary theme of the poem, however, is the moral choice with which America is faced. Kraus, Michelle, Allen Ginsberg: An Annotated Bibliography, 1969-1977, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1980. For though Ginsberg movingly evokes his bond of poetic son with father Whitman and his deep appreciation of his lonely old “courage-teacher,” this personal and ghostly community of gay poets is no longer Whitman’s idealized “America of love.” In essence, Ginsberg suggests that time has revealed Whitman’s amatory America to be a myth and no longer a credible source of inspiration for a poet with ambitions to walk in Whitman’s footsteps. 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”.. Style Ginsberg’s affinity with Whitman is evident in the next stanza in which the old poet suddenly appears as an incongruous, yet welcome, element: “I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.” Like Ginsberg, Whitman was also homosexual and would have felt equally out of place in the glare of the supermarket, a wholesome bastion where families feel free to shop at night. The language and subject matter of “Howl” hit such a raw nerve with the U.S. government that litigation over it led to an obscenity trial. POEM TEXT Here is an analysis of the poem A Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg, one of the leaders of the Beat Generation. For additional information on Clif…, A Story about the Most Important Thing (Rakaz o Samom Glavnom) by Evgenii Zamiatin, 1923, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle Of The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Sheva' Ha-Shanim Ha-Hen: 1939-1946), A Survey of China's Book Publishing Industry: 2005–2006, https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/supermarket-california, Rhino Records released a boxed set of four compact discs of Ginsberg’s poems and songs titled, In 1993 Elektra Nonesuch released a libretto written by Allen Ginsberg (with music by Phillip Glass) called “Hydrogen Jukebox.”, Jerry Aronson directed and produced the documentary. Supermarkets are places of abundance and choice and can be seen as metaphor for American-style capitalism. Throughout his life, Whitman’s work formed an important basis for Ginsberg’s individualism and his desire to write using clear language, thereby making poetry accessible to many people. Most important, he employs the physical setting of his poem in a symbolically significant way. A Supermarket in California. In a mixed review written in 1957 and appearing in Sewanee Review, poet and critic James Dickey argues that Ginsberg lacks a sense of craft in “Howl,” claiming that just about anybody can be a poet. Howl He does this metaphorically, however, by placing Whitman literally at the gates of hell. “A Supermarket in California” is a long-line poem by polemical Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. 509-10. And what vision of America did he have in mind when he finally died in 1892? “There is absolutely no art involved, in the context of the general use of the words ‘art’ and ‘craft.’ Such craft of art as there is, is in illuminating mental formations, and trying to observe the naked activity of my own mind. Allen Ginsberg uses his poetic imagination to invoke the spirits of Walt Whitman and Garcia Lorca in the poem. "A Supermarket in California" is a critique of 1950s American consumer culture, and Ginsberg wishes that he could get back to the good old days before people went "shopping for images." ‘A Supermarket in California’ The power of Allen Ginsberg allusion towards and ultimate achievement of transcendence in his work is heightened by his engagement with the broader tradition of US literature. Whitman and America Struggling with distance learning? — Ginsberg discusses his literary hero with two fellow poets. kinds of questions that Whitman asks of the meat and boys suggest how Ginsberg himself sees Whitman: as someone who is ravenous of all kinds of knowledge, both practical and inspirational. “Will we walk all night through solitary streets?” lends the line its outward sweep, while the sentence that follows drops the lights to a single focus: “The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.” After this fall into near-blackness, the next line picks up the forward momentum again: “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?” Then, as if imitating the movement of the boat of Charon, ferryman into the underworld, over the river Lethe’s water of forgetfulness, Ginsberg evokes four short dips of the oars and a long glide over three printed lines without a comma break up to the question mark that ends the poem: “Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?”. This possibility of being openly gay in America is one of the. Leaving behind his self-consciousness, Ginsberg brazenly strolls with Whitman in “solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.” They indulge in sensual, edible pleasures and are not held accountable to the “real world” in this fantasy. As an artist who was at the forefront of a counterculture movement in opposition to the “Leave-it-to-Beaver” Eisenhower years, Ginsberg was an outsider on a suburban street. Historical Context 1993: The United States armed forces adopt a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy toward gay men and women in the military, effectively keeping homosexuality a violation of army code and forcing gay individuals to conceal their sexuality. From this excerpt, it can best be inferred that the speaker is Almost like a stage manager overseeing a fade-out, Ginsberg narrows the visual focus to the two poets, Whitman and Ginsberg, and concludes with their complete vanishing in blackness and smoke. "A Supermarket in California" takes place in a neon-lit supermarket and on back streets lined with houses and parked blue automobiles. - was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture. Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California" Literary Analysis 1669 Words | 7 Pages. Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes,” we understand that this isn’t an empirical, objective supermarket being described, but rather a vision of a supermarket filtered through a particular (daydreaming) consciousness. Have a specific question about this poem? 186-87. A Supermarket in California Today Allen Ginsberg is regarded as one of the 20th century’s seminal Beat poets. . 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