Clareified

Dawn asked me if I wanted to do a Poetry Wednesday (and by ask, I mean insisted, and by insisted, I mean a gun to my head).

I’m not a huge fan of poetry and tried my best to take as little poetry classes as necessary in college. So, when deciding which poem to use I had a very limited pool to select from (a Shakespeare sonnet? a feminist commentary from Margaret Atwood? a dramatic monologue from T.S. Eliot? or how about some deconstructed modernist poetry from Allen Ginsberg?)

I chose Ginsberg. For added pleasure, try reading it aloud. I apologize for the small text – the regular width of the post area forced breaks in the lines. The only way to maintain the poem’s structure was by decreasing the font size.

A Supermarket in California

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit
supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles
full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! — and you,
Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the
meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price
bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and
followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting
artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does
your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel
absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to
shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in
driveways, home to our silent cottage?
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?

I’ve always loved this poem. It is so bright and shiny, yet dark and mysterious too. Personally, it echoes a constant battle of my love for nature and old ways versus my love for technology and the future. And whenever I go to a big grocery store I can’t help but say to myself “Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?”

I hope Dawn doesn’t expect me to write an analysis of this poem – I gave that up when I got my degree. These days, I enjoy reading for the sake of reading. If necessary, I guess I could discuss Walt Whitman’s influence on Allen Ginsberg – but that is fairly obvious and I wouldn’t want to bore you. Or how about the demise of nature to commercialism in America? Peppers wrapped in cellophane versus those grown in your back yard? In this modern Garden of Eden the forbidden fruit is shrink-wrapped and date-stamped, who’s hand has plucked it from the tree?

Perhaps he is looking for inspiration in the ice cream aisle. Or maybe he just did too many drugs that night. Anyway, read what you want into the poem. I know what it means to me, you know what it means to you and that’s all that matters.

Mary, is one of my invisible internet friends, she usually blogs here. -Ed.

This entry was posted by Dawn Summers on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 12:23 am and is filed under Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.