more than real - exploring two poems

Class project blog for LGBT359M / Looking into "A Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg and "The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep" by Trace Peterson

[ginsberg-peterson]

final thoughts

Well, I think that’s it, folks. 

What I appreciated most about this process was that I ended up finding more about what makes these poems funny than what I initially expected. When reading the poems originally, I connected to that surrealistic aspect, but I appreciate that now I can recognize the other aspects of queerness and comedy within them. 

I hope you who have read this have come to love the two poems as much as I do. Thanks for reading!

[ginsberg-peterson]

accepting surreality - further structural analysis

In an earlier post, I discussed how surrealism is used as the tool to create surprise and thus humor. To finish up this project, I would like to continue to my structural analysis and show that the way the poems reconcile with surreality is what makes them queer. 

Once these poems have broken from reality and entered the surreal, their surreal qualities continue to escalate. In “A Supermarket in California,” we start with running into dead poet Federico Garcia Lorca, breaking the initial reality, but soon there is another dead poet in the form of Walt Whitman, who is hassling grocery store boys, and the narrator following and joining him on his ventures. In “The Valley Are So Lush and Steep,” the side effects start with “’phase shift[ing] into a fourth dimension”, but soon include other impossibilities like telekinesis, “punk rock anamorphosis” and growing a mouse ear in the palm of the hand. The drugs themselves also have increasingly strange names, so that even if the effects do not initially seem bizarre, they are placed in a surreal context by the naming of them. Some examples include Novascotia, which provides “remoteness” but “made me feel slightly alienated around other poets”, or Jamieleecurtisol, which “made me witty and urban” The name provides a context that makes the side effects humorous and bizarre. 

We might expect to return to reality by the end of the poem, to find ourselves grounded again. There are moments when that almost happens. The best example is in the Ginsberg line, where he says “(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the / supermarket and feel absurd).” Here, amongst the various moments of surrealism, the narrator critiques their belief in these events. They find an absurdity in the more-than-possible odyssey he has taken. 

But the poem doesn’t end there. What we get in the end of both these poems is not a return to reality, but instead an acceptance in surreality. “A Supermarket in California” ends with the lines 

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?

At the beginning of this stanza, we are still tied to reality - there are blue automobiles in driveways and silent cottages. But by the time we reach the end of the poem, with Whitman standing on the shores of Lethe, we have moved away from that. We are not in the world of the supermarket. We are not in a reality that would require us to disbelieve in the presence of the dead American poet. Instead, we have fully accepted and embraced the surreality of the world. 

Peterson also resists the urge to return to reality, with the final stanza:

“I think I am going to stick with Pastoralwenchtrin for awhile and see where this goes. It’s quiet here and there are sheep and no wolves masquerading as bears climbing the hillside of an apple danish I bought from my student loan debt ceiling. As long as I pay the credit card bills by end of the month and get my name changed in time for the church basement sale, maybe I can find a way to live. As my body reaches a kind of equilibrium, I am trying to have as small a percentage of me as possible be fabricated as method acting and as great a possibility as a pink skull half-shaven skyline be real. The valleys are so lush and steep. How to end not wanting to be myself being not quite myself.”

In the end, the narrator is still on medication that has surreal effects on her body; however, instead of switching medications again or of trying to find that one perfect medication that will make everything okay and normal, there is an acceptance of the surreal situation that has occurred. And there’s a queerness there, for both poems, in destabilizing expectations of reality. We all watched Wizard of Oz - you go to the magical land, but you always come back. Surrealism is fun, but the normal ending of the story is that we return to reality. These poems subvert that, queer that, in ignoring that impulse; instead, they are seeing the world shift away from reality and accepting it. 

To sum up in overly simple terms, the comedy in “A Supermarket in California” and “The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep” comes from the way they break from reality, while the queerness comes from the way they never return to that reality. 

[ginsberg-peterson]

funny guy ginsberg, or “grins”berg

After looking into an alternate technique of queer humor in Peterson’s piece, I’d like to look at Ginsberg and his humor. I am going to look beyond just the poem “A Supermarket in California”, mostly because there is a lot of interesting discussion surrounding the humor in Ginsberg’s poetry and I am intrigued by it. Here’s a little sample of what people are saying about Ginsberg’s humor. 

Let’s first look at what Ginsberg himself said in a 1977 interview with Kenneth Koch. When asked what he liked about his poetry, he stated, “ The other thing I like is that I think it's witty or funny. That is the phrasing itself. . . There's a funniness to the manipulation of the syntax.” Ignoring content completely, Ginsberg focuses instead of how the words themselves feel and sound, finding humor in vocabulary and structure instead of meaning. This idea is echoed by Mark Doty in his essay “Human Seraphim: “Howl," Sex, and Holiness” - he references the lines “Time, & alarm clocks fell on their / heads every day for the next decade, / who cut their wrists three times successively / unsuccessfully.” Doty notes that  “You can even hear Ginsberg’s chuckle in the sonics; that “successively unsuccessfully” is meant to make us grin”, acknowledging Ginsberg’s idea of wittiness and humor through the use of language. There’s something unique and unusual in provoking humorous reaction through syntax instead of meaning. (It’s also fun to watch the video I posted with this idea in mind - Ginsberg so obviously relishes the text.)

There were two other moments in Doty’s essay that felt important to this conversation. In this first quote, Doty is discussing a reading that Ginsberg did at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival:

Then he starts in on his ode to his sphincter muscle, a quirky little paean of praise. This seems to me the most unlikely poem in the world to find a congenial welcome on the ears of the assembled secondary school teachers, so I can’t help looking around the ranked seats to check it out. Sure enough, they are loving it, they are laughing and clapping, absorbed in delight. . . But Ginsberg entirely transcended the question of polite behavior, of queerness, of the appropriate [and] created some zone of permission and distinction for himself that seemed to make all things possible, and he seemed to occupy a category all his own.

Doty here is introducing the idea of Ginsberg as using his humor to surpass and destabilize norms. Ginsberg was able to present a poem that was “the most unlikely poem in the world to find a congenial welcome” and made it acceptable in the eyes of the audience because he was able to make them laugh. The following quote sets up a similar concept:

This pose—transcendent wild boys versus spirit-crushing monolithic Moloch—is an affecting one, in small doses, though it might be a bit hard to take were “Howl” not so exuberantly funny. That’s the part I’d forgotten, or perhaps never really seen. Was Ginsberg’s humor harder to get, back when his transgressions seemed more incendiary?

In this case, Doty is pointing out that Ginsberg uses his humor as a way to make his work. . . not necessarily more palatable, because that gives an air of desiring social approval, but rather as a way of providing levity in a text that could get overdone. Ginsberg is doing the work of queering by writing in way that could be unacceptable, but not seen as such because of the comedy. Doty, in both situations, is acknowledging how Ginsberg’s humor in his poetry is used to transform opinion, whether that is drawing laughter out of a poem about his asshole or undercutting what could be am irritating trope in his collection.  

The last interpretation that I want to look at is by Harvard Professor David Perkins, who says:

Perhaps the hardest aspect of the poem to accept is, paradoxically, its humor. . . Ginsberg's self-reducing humor helps to explain the remarkably good-natured acceptance bestowed on him.  He is perceived more as a spiritual clown than as a threat.  A psychoanalyst might suggest that Ginsberg is a child testing the father's love.  His provocations are what Erik Erikson calls "teasing."  They defy and disarm at the same time. . . .

While this whole quote provides a fascinating grounds of exploration, what really draws me in is the last sentence, because it feels like the crux of queer comedy and the humor that Ginsberg utilizes. Consider the poem Doty referenced, Ginsberg’s ode to his own asshole. He observed how the presentation of this poem defied the norms - for who else could write this poem and get away with it - and also disarmed - as the audience was led to laughter instead of discomfort or upset. Queer comedy is disruptive, yes, because it’s challenging the norms, but it disarms because in that challenge, it creates laughter. Through Perkins’ perspective, we see how Ginsberg’s humor fits so very well into our greater understanding of queer comedy. 

[ginsberg-peterson]

““queer””

Confession: I feel kind of dumb because I realized that I devoted a whole post to picking apart how I was using the terms around “surrealism” and didn’t even touch on the variety of ways that I’m employing the term “queer.” I have definitely been referencing queer comedy in earlier posts, without necessary touching on what that actually is. I will say, my terminology post was a product of me trying to figure out what I wanted to do with this project and a concern that I really was misusing the term surreal. Also, seeing as the only people who are likely to be reading this are also in this queer studies class, it didn’t really cross my mind to get into definitions. One of the fun things about taking a lot of queer studies classes is you forget that certain concepts aren’t common knowledge, especially things like how queerness and the act of queering are not inherently about LGBT people and topics. With that in mind, a quick touch on uses of queer. 

First off, I’m using queer to represent all the sexualities and genders that fall under the queer umbrella. Both of these poems are explicitly queer in that they are written by queer poets - a gay man and a queer trans woman (who has at different points and time also described herself as “genderqueer)  - about queer subjects.  “A Supermarket in California” could be a little opaque, depending on one’s level of cultural know-how. The elements that most easily point to queer content are the facts that 1. Allen Ginsberg was gay, 2. this poem was in Howl and Other Poems, his collection which led to an obscenity charge, due in part to the representation of homosexual sexual practices, and 3. the poets he mentions, Walt Whitman and Federico Garcia Lorca, are both notably known for being queer. “The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep” is, on the other hand, is obviously queer, as it is about a trans woman experimenting with medication to block testosterone.

The other way that queer is used is as a verb so that we are “queering” something. Broadly, queering is an act of destabilizing the norm. Sometimes this converges with queerness in terms of sexuality and gender. One great example of this technique is (and it may be a little bit of a random choice) Miike Snow’s music video for “Genghis Khan”, which follows the story of a James Bond-type supervillain struggling to kill the spy hero figure because of his attraction to him and ends with the two getting together and having a happy little family. The story is queering/destabilizing the norm of the James Bond type of tale in that the hero does not beat the supervillain, but ends up dating him. Queerness is terms of sexuality is the tool through which this action of queering can happen; however, queering can happen sans queerness. 

For instance, I have this joke that every time I cut across the grass instead of going on the sidewalk, I am “queering” the idea of pathways or something, with the idea that sidewalks are a norm that is meant to be followed. I don’t know if it’s an especially good joke, but it amuses me.

[ginsberg-peterson]

makin’ references - humor through allusion

One of the ideas I’ve thought about a lot in terms of queer comedy is recontextualization. It’s a form of disrupting expectations and queering a situation (practically a tenet of queer comedy), in which we take something and put it in a different context, a new context which comments on and makes that thing funny. The humorous use of recontextualization can be found in these poems. One of the prime examples of this concept is when Peterson references John Keat’s poem “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, quoted below:     

But the hyper-concentration that Crepusculane offers caused me instead to stare at a Grecian Urn for days on end, transfixed by thoughts of lighting up and smoking the latest poet laureate or at least getting a medical prescription for him/her to become culturally all over me.

“Ode to a Grecian Urn”, which can be read here, is a famous poem, which in one analysis by Stephen Hebron, is described as “a consideration of human experience” and “a poem notable not for the answers which it may or may not present, but for the skill and intensity with which it asks the questions” (Hebron). There’s something queer, then, to take a poem, an experience, that is held with reverence and completely disregard that. In “The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep”, the consideration of a Grecian urn is not special or significant. Rather, it is one of a whole litany of strange, surreal side effects, sliding in between experiences of drugs such as one that makes “my skin fluorescent green and stretchable over any nearby hardwood surfaces.” The humor at this moment comes from the irreverence - the recontextualization of Keat’s poem serves as a way to parody it, by ignoring its literary position to make it one of many strange occurrences. We laugh because we recognize the reference and how Peterson has queered it by placing into a different context. 

[ginsberg-peterson]

a moment of consideration

While the primary focus of this blog remains the same, I would like to open it up slightly. As I’ve been really looking into these two poems, I’ve found that there are multiple angles of queer comedy to consider. I’m definitely not finished exploring the use of surrealism in these poems as a form of queer comedy, but I want to detour for a few posts to think about the other way queer humor manifests in my poetry selections. This project is fueled by my intense fondness for these two poems and I want to give them their exploratory due. 

[ginsberg-peterson]

breaking from reality - a structural comparison

What’s fun about comparing these two poems is that there are very different, but they both have a place at which they break from reality and enter the surreal, which is the place that they stop just being poetic and start being funny. Let’s consider. 

“A Supermarket in California” begins with “What thoughts I have of your tonight, Walt Whitman, for / I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache / self-conscious looking at the full moon.” While the narrator is addressing Walt Whitman, the dead poet is not a physical presence. This musing still exists in reality, as does the beginning of the shopping trip when he gets really excited about the various elements of the grocery store. It is not until we hit the end of the first stanza, with the line “and you, Garcia Lorca, what / were you doing down by the watermelons?”, that we enter surreality. The introduction of Garcia Lorca breaks us from reality, as there is no way that a dead 20th-century Spanish poet would be wandering around a supermarket in California in the middle of the night. His sudden realized presence - for he is physicalized, unlike the merely mentioned Walt Whitman of the first line - is startling and surprising. We are reading something that is functioning in reality until suddenly, out of nowhere, it is not. 

“The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep” has this same structure of reality surprised by the surreal. The first line is “I have not been having an easy HRT experience for a trans gal, especially when it comes to blocking testosterone so my body can develop properly in response to estrogen.” Peterson is setting up a realistic situation - stories of difficulties surrounding transition are not especially surreal. The next few lines consist of her naming medication and the issues she has with it - Spironolactone, Finasteride, Progesterone. It’s not until we hit Dutasteride - which is still a real medication - that we break from reality, with the line, “Dutasteride made me too sleepy to function and caused me to phase shift into a fourth dimension at unexpected moments, so I switched to Walzanone.” Much like in Ginsberg’s poem, this sudden shift is surprising - Peterson has created a pattern of listing medication and naming its effects on her, and while she continues that pattern, the content departs radically from reality. 

Both these poems break from reality in a startling and surprising way, which I realized is what makes them funny to me. With that in mind, I discovered an article called “Humor, Laughter, and Those Aha Moments”, in the Harvard Mahoney Neuroscience Institute’s newsletter On The Brain. While it’s more a scientific than a literary bent, I appreciate the breaking down of a joke. They discuss the three phases of a joke: “First, the listener encounters some type of incongruity: a punchline that seems out of place compared with the joke’s set-up. Then, following a cognitive construct called surprise and coherence, the listener tries to resolve this incongruity. Finally, the listener’s brain determines the joke’s sense— or lack thereof—and decides whether or not the joke is funny” (1). With the example they chose, the laughter comes from the realization of the double meaning of a word so that what seems like nonsense resolves itself into sense. 

These poems are, in a way, structured like a joke, with surrealism as the tool to create the incongruity. The introduction of surreal elements into a realistic world creates an incongruity that surprises us and we laugh because the pieces of what we believe the world to be are no longer in order. However, these poems differ from a joke because the final conclusion of the poem isn’t the return to reality - there are no double meanings realized - but instead a reconciliation with the implausibilities of the world as it now is. 

[ginsberg-peterson]

Appropriate find of the day - Allen Ginsberg reading his poem “A Supermarket in California.” 

I love his playfulness in this reading, how he’s vocally expressing the humor on the line “and you, Garcia Lorca, what / were you doing down by the watermelons?” 

[ginsberg-peterson]

terminology

I want to talk very specifically about some terms that I plan to use in my exploration. Picky, picky, picky, but I like to really nail down my core terminology before attempting to dig in and try to understand something.

I’ve been referring to this project as “an investigation into the use of surrealism as a tool for queer comedy” in these two poems by Ginsberg and Peterson. But surrealism is one of those words where there seems to be a colloquial definition that may be a bastardization of its actual definition. With that in mind, I looked up “surreal” and “surrealism” in the always dependable Oxford English Dictionary. 

Surreal is defined as “having the qualities of surrealist art; bizarre, dreamlike” (”surreal”), while surrealism is defined as “a movement of art and literature seeking to express the subconscious mind by any of a number of techniques, including the irrational juxtaposition of realistic images” (”surrealism”). There are aspects of these definitions that appeal to me - “bizarre” and “dreamlike” both describe qualities of the Ginsberg and Peterson poems, and “irrational juxtaposition of realistic images” also is a potential descriptor of moments in these works. I also appreciate that the definition of surreal included an example of the similar term “surreality”, quoted from the Encyclopedia Britannica Micropaedia IX, “The world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in ‘an absolute reality, a surreality’” (”surreal”), as the marriage of the real and unreal is really what I want to recognize and understand in these works.

What I want to be careful of is the inherent relationship between the concept of surrealism and the specific movement of Surrealist art. My goal here is not to specifically connect the work of Ginsberg and Peterson to the movement established in Europe by Andre Breton in 1924, influenced by Jung and Freud, and including artists such as Max Ernst and Rene Magritte (Malyon), but rather really focus on the humor found in that place where reality and unreality, surreality, collide. 

My search for pinpointing exactly what I wanted to be examining through surrealism took me to both the most helpful and unhelpful place: Wikipedia, the treasure trove of all knowledge that can never be academically utilized due to its unreliable nature. The Wikipedia entry of “surreal humor” led me to a few free pages of the Google Book edition of The Language of Surrealism by Peter Stockwell, where he differentiates between surrealism and surreal humor, in that “incongruity can be regarded as their key, dominant feature” (177). This difference between surrealism and surreal humor is something I would also like to consider when looking at these poems. I find that incongruity is a definite element - consider how inherently incongruous it is to find a dead poet in a grocery store is - in the humor found in these poems. 

Which is to say, I have settled on the use of surrealism and surreal humor, with the knowledge that I won’t be historically connecting them to Surrealist art. I have to stop writing the word surreal now because it no longer looks like a real word.  

EDIT 5/3: I got my hands on a physical copy of Peter Stockwell’s The Language of Surrealism, which allowed me to take a closer look at some of the ideas mentioned above. His comments about surreal humor fall into a larger discussion about the portability of surrealism. Stockwell explains that “surrealist techniques became portable, in the sense that they could be detached from the politics and ideology of core surrealism while being recognisably surrealist in appearance,” which allowed “world’s artists and writers that striking, hallucinatory, escapist, fantastical, and mind-altering effects could be generated by the exploitation of ordinary language” (174-175). I mostly include this quote to put a pin in some of my musings above - the surrealism I see does not have to be connected to these movements (and has historical precedence for that separation), because many authors utilize these techniques without ascribing them to Surrealism’s philosophies.

[ginsberg-peterson]

beginnings

This blog is focused on examining two poems by queer authors, “A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg and “The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep” by Trace Peterson, and exploring how the queer humor in these pieces can be found through their use of more-than-realistic images. 

[ginsberg-peterson]

I have not been having an easy HRT experience for a trans gal, especially when it comes to blocking testosterone so my body can develop properly in response to estrogen. * Spironolactone gave me brain fog, so to block T, I switched to Finasteride. * The blocker dose of Finasteride made me too sleepy to function, so I switched to Progesterone. * Progesterone had some nice effects but it made me loopy and had a kind of thought-freezing effect, so I switched to Dutasteride. * Dutasteride made me too sleepy to function and caused me to phase shift into a fourth dimension at unexpected moments, so I switched to Walzanone. * Walzanone helped ease off my body hair, but it gave me unanticipated telekenetic powers which would cause a table to fly crashing acrosss the room when I got upset with someone, so I switched to Benefiontin. * Benefiontin seemed to be working for a while and I could genuinely concentrate, until I slowly became aware that it was making my skin fluorescent green and stretchable over any nearby hardwood surfaces. Punk rock anamorphosis had ended long ago, so I switched to Penalzombion. * While I enjoyed the ultra-feminine high that Penalzombion enfaulked from my kinesthetic being, it had the unfortunate side effect of causing me to hate most poetry I hear, or maybe that was just poetry. In any case, the constant sore throat or what they call the “Penalzombion engorgement” became highly inconvenient when I needed to sing impromptu arias for job talks on composition theory. So I switched to Rubicon. * Though not technically a blocker, Rubicon had several advantages in terms of how it personified and mirrored my t-levels internally. A short-range tactical missile flew by in search of its drone-targeted recipient. Testosterone self-reflectiveness on Rubicon invaded my being on a coding level of intensity to the point where rows of shark teeth swallowed every time management skill I ever learned. There was no going back. I decided that Rubicon was too much of a simultaneously alienated and intimately ski mask experience. So I switched to Novascotia. * The best side effect of Novascotia was its remoteness. Though it made me feel slightly alienated around other poets, I did manage to get a lot of writing done. However, in the process I lost all sense of reality and missed my grant deadlines for the fourth time. A mouse ear grew out of my hand. Peach cobbler. So I switched to Nepotismapolitan. * With Nepotismapolitan I definitely engrotted some anti-testosterone connections in the entertainment world, which had me at an advantage when passing as entertainmentally female, but my pores became enormous. When I think back I wonder if Nepotismapolitan was taunting me the whole time. Gam tumescent wing growth polited out of the sinking vessel. Due to interaction warnings I couldn’t eat too much processed food anymore and my T levels were still too high, so I switched to Wellmasteride. * I liked the feeling of cosmic omnipotence corresponding with complete and utter abjection that Wellmasteride gave me, being at once a unique delicate flower/snowflake and a humanistic reproconfection seeking air time like every other platelet in the bloodstream, but it made me inconveniently leery of discussions about trigger warnings and delaying puberty in children. Pang of detained weekend fixture turned permanent yawp. I stopped thugging around in my endocrine blotter with Wellmasteride, and instead turned to Jaimeleecuritsol. * Jaimeleecurtisol made me witty and urbane. Being around me was like an episode of female Frasier slightly sped up. But soon the crash happened and we were in a recession. Jaimeleecurtisol caused me to scream and scream at the horrible truth coming at me about how people really perceived my gender suddenly rushing at me around street corners. So I switched to Smallpondilaxone. * Smallpondilaxone made me feel big. For a minute I contemplated calling an agent to discuss my enormous very specialized coupon stash, but I couldn’t get out of bed. So next I tried Crepusculane. * Now the great thing about Crepusculane was that on this one I really felt like myself on five cups of coffee for a few minutes lugging a trampoline up the capital steps past the stone lions that guarded the secret to what’s inside increasingly smaller panties I never held any responsibility for, a good place to do research. I made all kinds of appointments to publish poet things and attend everybody’s readings in a stacker, almost steroid-like configuration demented with charm. But the hyper-concentration that Crepusculane offers caused me instead to stare at a Grecian Urn for days on end, transfixed by thoughts of lighting up and smoking the latest poet laureate or at least getting a medical prescription for him/her to become culturally all over me. Crepusculane rendered my t-levels nearly invisible as I lay swooning across a Chatterton velvet couch in my garret, but there was no one around but me to serenade, so I switched to Lesbiamine. * Lesbiamine caused .......................................... in peace talks ........... ............................................................................................................... .............................. rankled tall girl spat juicer ............................ but ............................................................................................................... ......... looks at your spork ................... like a gorgon, tufts of .......... ............................................................................................................... kissing us in the museum .................................................................... ....................... making me ................. attachment weekend blocker ............................................................................................................... my leg around your .............................................................................. .................................. wetter, a death ................... bank holiday itch ............................................................................................................... clasped ……………………………………… in a restaurant booth ........ ...... or vamp stamped .................. something chocolate .................. ............................................................................................................... ..............................anxiety being unsexy……………………….............. ..................and you need lateness ……………….…………................... destorying me ..................................................................................... .................................................................too intense........................... like the crushed flower. I couldn’t take all the ellipses anymore and they were intruding into my dissertation writing time, so I switched to Pastoralwenchtrin. * I think I am going to stick with Pastoralwenchtrin for awhile and see where this goes. It’s quiet here and there are sheep and no wolves masquerading as bears climbing the hillside of an apple danish I bought from my student loan debt ceiling. As long as I pay the credit card bills by end of the month and get my name changed in time for the church basement sale, maybe I can find a way to live. As my body reaches a kind of equilibrium, I am trying to have as small a percentage of me as possible be fabricated as method acting and as great a possibility as a pink skull half-shaven skyline be real. The valleys are so lush and steep. How to end not wanting to be myself being not quite myself.

Trace Peterson, “The Valleys Are So Lush and Steep”

[ginsberg-peterson]

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.          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?

Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”