It’s been a long time. I plan to update more when I finish finals, which will be after tomorrow.
I was reading Allen Ginsberg’s A Supermarket In California while failing to study for my final tomorrow. The poem is about the narrator, possibly Ginsberg, following “Walt Whitman” around a Berkeley supermarket at night. Though I knew Ginsberg was a beat poet and most famous in the ’50s, i hadn’t placed him in any particular time, and therefore placed him in the present or near past. Thus, when I read his anachronistic references to Whitman, I felt that the distance the narrator felt from Whitman was much the same as my own – America’s premier poet, who lived in an America so far removed from my own he might as well be Chaucer or Virgil. Still, he is the American Poet, and so I, like the narrator, feel close to him as if he some how matters to my life or my world.
Then I read the date on the bottom of the poem. Berkeley, 1955.
1955!
This poem was written over half a century ago; there is nearly as great a temporal difference between me and this narrator, as between the narrator and Whitman. What was Berkeley like in 1955? Less homeless, hippies, liberals? Less Asians. Even more sleepy and suburban than it is currently? Was there even a supermarket in Berkeley in 1955?
The profound irony of the poem, while I read it (though I have now spoiled the surprise for anyone who reads this post first) was that I identified with the narrator in many ways, only to realize that I could write the same poem today about the Ginsberg of then. The man is also an American Poet, someone who defined American post-war modernity in a way that perhaps shaped all American art subsequently. References to famous writers past, in the writing of a famous writer, always strike me in an odd way. I feel like I am somehow taken out of the fiction and brought into closer commune with the writer himself. Famous writers are typically great writers, and a Great Writer is infallible and sometimes frightening in genius. I wonder what it was like to be a physics undergraduate under Newton or Einstein; that’s how I feel sometimes, reading Hemingway or Solzhenitsyn. When I read a poem by Ginsburg in his early days, about the staggeringly intimidating Walt Whitman, I can feel in him the reader and student – someone who has not yet garnered the reputation he will come to have, is maybe insecure about his own abilities, and is certainly in awe of and measures himself by the Great American Poet. He feels like someone that I could meet in a Berkeley supermarket, rather than some kind of God-man who dominates American poetry.
Ginsburg later said he hated this poem, which is interesting to me because it is one of the few modern poems I have ever read off hand and enjoyed immediately, without needing to delve too extensively into the meaning of the work. It is there, I am sure, if I ever wanted to do so; but it is also immediately pleasurable in construction and imagery. I happened upon it accidentally, and maybe some day I will return to it – for now, though, I’ll leave it be.
