i so love puffed corn

A Supermarket in California

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

We did unseen poetry for literature today! (And for 3 hours straight, at that.) Unseen poetry is inarguably my favourite section in the entire literature paper. MND is a pain to read, TKAM is depressing and causes me to descend into melancholia, and unseen prose rarely piques my interest with its large chunks of paragraphing.

But unseen poetry — oh! I could sing the praises of unseen poetry and the vast unnumbered vistas it has for us to explore and analyse! The layers of meaning are almost exhilarating to peel off, and my pen occasionally trembles with delight to expound on all the nuances and the varied meanings throughout the text!

Anyway, we covered a teeny bit of beat poetry today and talked a little about the beat generation of poets and I really enjoyed this brief departure from the usual monotony of the curriculum. Besides, the romanticism and liberation of that era is, for lack of a better word, totally boss. I admire them for their vision and free-spiritedness, and although I am not totally anti-establishment, I find their sparkling insouciance and the entire idea of being the vanguard for an entire new literary form just. so. cool.