Another independent post
I just read over the writer's blog assignment sheet again and realized that these posts are supposed to be more formal than I've been making them... Looking back at my other entries, I feel like I’ve fulfilled the requirements for each post (250 words, class related subject, thesis, etc), but I haven’t been making them as structured as they probably should be. So, this will be where I change that.
Although we talked about it all day in class, I want to look into “A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg. A lot of people were shooting around ideas on the point of the story, ranging from it being about homosexuality, to it being a simple message on the negativity of conformity. However, even though I made my point pretty clearly in class, I think that Allen Ginsberg is trying to show that he is following Walt Whitman’s non-conformist ways in the supermarket, thereby following the same non-conformist ways in his writing.
As it’s been already established before, Walt Whitman was Ginsberg’s idol; he even mentions it in lines like “Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher…” (Ginsberg L12). So, that point is taken care of. To prove that Whitman is a sign of non-conformity, look into the setting of the poem. “Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!” (Ginsberg L3). This shows that every wife and baby is the same, and the husbands are just picking them out like groceries. The fact that a supermarket’s variety of identical, prepackaged, nearly perfect goods is a metaphor for conventionality also supports the generic setting. However, Whitman is seen “poking among the meats in the refrigerator” (Ginsberg L4) and “never passing the cashier” (Ginsberg L7). To prove that these symbolize the character’s breaking from the norm, the store detective starts following them. It should be clear that this new character is sketched out by their differing in the cultural norm (just poking around and avoiding the cashier), just as society would be sketched out by their unconventional writing styles.
This is merely a scratching of the surface of the meaning of this poem. I would probably need the full 4 page limit of Paper 2 to fully describe it, but will I? Probably not, considering the fact that everyone is probably going to write identical papers about it. In the end, there’s a lot to look into for this poem, and what I’ve mentioned is just the beginning of it.
Works Cited
Ginsberg, Allen. “A Supermarket in California.” Literature: A World of Writing. Ed. Joseph Terry. New York: Pearson Education, 2011. 629. Print.
Although we talked about it all day in class, I want to look into “A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg. A lot of people were shooting around ideas on the point of the story, ranging from it being about homosexuality, to it being a simple message on the negativity of conformity. However, even though I made my point pretty clearly in class, I think that Allen Ginsberg is trying to show that he is following Walt Whitman’s non-conformist ways in the supermarket, thereby following the same non-conformist ways in his writing.
As it’s been already established before, Walt Whitman was Ginsberg’s idol; he even mentions it in lines like “Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher…” (Ginsberg L12). So, that point is taken care of. To prove that Whitman is a sign of non-conformity, look into the setting of the poem. “Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!” (Ginsberg L3). This shows that every wife and baby is the same, and the husbands are just picking them out like groceries. The fact that a supermarket’s variety of identical, prepackaged, nearly perfect goods is a metaphor for conventionality also supports the generic setting. However, Whitman is seen “poking among the meats in the refrigerator” (Ginsberg L4) and “never passing the cashier” (Ginsberg L7). To prove that these symbolize the character’s breaking from the norm, the store detective starts following them. It should be clear that this new character is sketched out by their differing in the cultural norm (just poking around and avoiding the cashier), just as society would be sketched out by their unconventional writing styles.
This is merely a scratching of the surface of the meaning of this poem. I would probably need the full 4 page limit of Paper 2 to fully describe it, but will I? Probably not, considering the fact that everyone is probably going to write identical papers about it. In the end, there’s a lot to look into for this poem, and what I’ve mentioned is just the beginning of it.
Works Cited
Ginsberg, Allen. “A Supermarket in California.” Literature: A World of Writing. Ed. Joseph Terry. New York: Pearson Education, 2011. 629. Print.