A Supermarket in California (1955). Summary and Description

A Supermarket in California” appears in Ginsberg’s renowned 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems. Although it is often considered a lesser poem in the collection because of its playful tone, the speaker in “A Supermarket in California” grapples with issues of tremendous importance. As does the landscape in “Howl,” the supermarket serves as a composite of the images of American life in the 1950s.

Written while Ginsberg was living in a cottage near the Berkeley campus, the poem reflects the style of the San Francisco Beat poets and also situates itself in the larger tradition of American poetry. In the first line Ginsberg addresses his major influence, Walt Whitman, simultaneously invoking him as a muse and looking ironically at his unfulfilled prophecy for America. He also writes in long-lined free verse, a technique Whitman pioneered.

At the start of the poem, Ginsberg walks down the moonlit sidewalk to a sprawling grocery store, where he has wandered in a tired, ill-at-ease state while “shopping for images.” Remarking on the families in the store, he encounters Whitman perusing the meats and the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca shopping for produce. This poem is often considered to contain references to Ginsberg’s homosexuality, and with a deliberate play on derogatory slang, he places the gay writers Whitman and Garcia Lorca among the “fruits” in the market. Ginsberg then trails Whitman through the store, following in his footsteps both literally and literarily.

In the last stanza, Ginsberg becomes the inquirer. Significantly, he asks, “Where are we going, Walt Whitman?” In his poetry nearly 100 years earlier, Whitman spoke of America as a vast frontier ripe for exploration. Ginsberg lived in an era characterized by the rise of suburbia, technology, and large chain stores. Whitman’s landscape was one of “green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn”; Ginsberg’s is one of “blue automobiles in driveways.” Ginsberg expresses his resistance to consumer culture and desire to remain the “poet outlaw,” as he and Whitman wander through the store tasting and possessing “and never passing the cashier.” Ginsberg considers the role of the poet as one outside the mainstream world of buyers.

At the end of the last stanza, Ginsberg invokes a different poetic tradition, that of a deceased poet leading a living one through the underworld. As Dante took Virgil as his guide in The Divine Comedy, so does Ginsberg follow Whitman to Lethe, one of the rivers that flowed through the ancient Greek mythological underworld Hades. Ginsberg’s use of Lethe, which translates literally as “forgetfulness,” suggests that with Whitman’s death, his vision of “the lost America of love,” is also forgotten. Ginsberg is left alone to ask his “dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,” what America do we have now?

For Discussion or Writing
1. In his poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman talks about laborers working in the fields to grow crops and raise cattle. How is the world that Whitman describes, in which the human “body electric” is immediately present in the production of goods, different from the “neon fruit supermarket,” where artificial lighting and mass-produced foods obscure the labor that went into producing those goods? What is the significance of living in a society where production is divorced from the things being produced, the products?

2. Discuss the significance of the parenthetical comment in the last stanza. How does this break in the speaker’s fantasy affect the rest of the poem? Why might Ginsberg “feel absurd”?