A Supermarket in California

Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California’’ appeared in his book Howl and Other Poems and is largely indicative of his writing style. The poem is also an example of the stream-of-consciousness and colloquial style toward which many of the Beat writers gravitated. Lines like “I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon” (Line 1) and “will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways” (Line 11) work to exhibit this sensibility. The Beat movement in literature was largely associated with jazz, psychedelic drug use, Zen Buddhism, rejection of cultural and sexual norms, and the critique of postwar American society. Ginsberg’s book Howl and by extension “A Supermarket in California’’ are often upheld as classic examples of Beat literature, other examples of which would be Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

Within a broader literary context, “A Supermarket in California” is a poet’s poem, referring specifically to the famous American poet Walt Whitman and Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. This name dropping is important as it allows Ginsberg to align himself with a school of poetry outside of his generation. The association with Whitman and Lorca shows that Ginsberg is interested in creating a lineage for himself and his own brand of poetics, seeing himself descended from these notable poets. “A Supermarket in California,” which is an ode to Whitman, was written in 1955 at the centennial of the publication of Whitman’s most well-known book, Leaves of Grass. Much like Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, Leaves of Grass, too, received great criticism, as it was deemed obscene due to the text’s homoerotic tones.