Featured Ginsberg Poem: “A Supermarket in California”

Highlighting Allen Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California” as this week’s featured poem is kind of an indulgence for me. I find great humor in some of the lines:

… babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

But it’s not all about fruits and vegetables and pork chops (though there are pork chops… and Walt Whitman is poking among them).

The essence of the poem is this: Ginsberg finds himself walking through a California supermarket where he comes upon unexpected figures such as Garcia Lorca and follows his poetic hero Walt Whitman around the store.

There is a balance in this prose poem between the private and public spheres, serious social awareness and absurd humor. There is an acceptance of human limitations along with the examination of a larger spiritual dimension. Ginsberg contrasts the consumerism of the society he was living in at the time of this poem’s writing (Berkeley, 1955) and Waltman’s existence during the mid- to late-1800s.

Here is the full text of the poem on Poets.org; there is also an audio recording, though it’s seriously lacking if you ask me… so here’s a much more interesting reading of the poem: