Here's the whole poem, "A Supermarket in California."
June 4, 2026
"What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!"
Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Allen Ginsberg. I'm sorry I let it slip past unnoted, but I'm noting it now. Marilyn Monroe had her 100th on Monday. That got way more attention in the media, so I could have observed it, on the right day, but I avoided that. She's had too much attention already. I imagine she's tired of it, tired of the form it takes.
Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas?... We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier....
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Today is also the 6 year anniversary of the BLM walkout when the Democrats and the left proved to the world that they had completely given up and any sort of objective truth and reasonable intelligent dialogue.
…compelling but superseded by ’Werner Herzog’s’ Yelp review of Trader Joe’s
Were any of those Beat writers any good at all? Who turns to Jack Kerouac for a great story? Or Ginsberg for an emotional lyric? Much less the lesser lights. They are more interesting as cultural figures of the post-WWII days than they are artists. This Ginsberg supermarket poem reads like self-parody. Even as cultural figures, they were much more marketing than reality. People were hiking the Appalachian Trail, in parts at least, and other trails long before Gary Snyder went up to be a fire outlook, as he would probably be among the first to point out.
also a member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA)
If you were going to blithely sample the produce as you strolled through the supermarket, your absolute last choice would be artichoke but we're asked to visualize the poets eating the most difficult-to-eat vegetable.
Artichokes were having a fling in the mid-'50s as an upscale vegetable and recipe saviour for American housewives. Pulling the leaves off and dipping them in melted butter was haute cuisine. And of course the hearts were jarred in marinade and easy to dump into salads and casseroles. Ginsberg is just a bad poet, AA.
Althouse said...
...but we're asked to visualize the poets eating the most difficult-to-eat vegetable.
"I'd like to meet the guy who invented these barbed-wire pineapples."
Not sure why people are looking for vegetables to eat. The "Produce Section" is such a new phenomena and humans are obviously not meant to eat them in quantity.
We started getting fat around the same time as refrigeration allowed us to eat perishable food year round.
The produce section is where you get stuff to feed your cows and sheep at most.
Eva Marie said...
also a member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA)
WTF?!
one of my faves. walt whitman, "which way does your beard point tonight?" is what i ask myself when i have some time to kill
He thiught conventional behavior was madness and vice versa
“Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witch hunting for profit, humorlessness, vanity, anger and ignorance… I’m a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too — everybody does, who has a little humanity.” - Allen Ginsberg
When I was in college, I loved “Howl,” and the Beat stuff.
And then, I moved to SF and lived among the Beats in North Beach. What utter garbage people. Dirty underpants drunks. Abandoned children. Everybody screwing everybody. Everything about them stank to high heaven.
Andrea Dworkin:
“I knew Allen would not be [a civil libertarian on principle alone]. I did think he was a civil libertarian. But, in fact, he was a pedophile. He did not belong to the North American Man/Boy Love Association out of some mad, abstract conviction that its voice had to be heard. He meant it. I take this from what Allen said directly to me, not from some inference I made. He was exceptionally aggressive about his right to [have sex with] children and his constant pursuit of underage boys.”
Some of us choose to remember that push to normalize sex with children . . . especially boys.
Ginsberg said his first sexual experience was at 8 with a man in the back of his granddad’s candy store. The guy was molested as a kid (sounds like with the consent of his grandfather) and molested kids as an adult - never proven but lots of allegations.
Was he always this trite
Ginsberg was 62 when he started a sexual relationship with Marcus Ewert who was 17 at the time. Ginsberg claimed his youngest sexual partners were 14 to 16 years old.
Their poetry was lousy. But you didn't read it for their literary quality or great insight into humanity, You read it for the pretense of the lifestyle, the feigned adventure. I happened to know some of them in their later years in the poetry milieu. Interesting people. Screwed up lives.
"She's had too much attention already."
Famous people be warned, seek not attention in too great a quantity lest ye run afoul of Attention Judge Althouse. Verdicts are final. Meow!
The Dirty Underpants Drunks will be playing the Cheetah Club later this month.
A liver-lipped pedophile.
Whatever notable cultural contributions he might have made, the association with pedophilia, well. That one is too far over the line to call 'fair'.
--- Some of us choose to remember
How many of you are there, Eva?
The problem with your moralizing is that sexual maturity comes at different times to all different people. Speaking for Ginsberg makes me a little sick, on general principles, but a relationship with a 17-year-old man or boy, that's hardly criminal in my book -- or even in most law books, I believe. That Ginsberg was 62 makes it yucky, but Ginsberg at any age was thoroughly yeecchy!
When his youngest lovers were 14 and 16 -- well, that is sexual maturity for many. Trying to draw the line that 15 years, 364 days is illegal but 16 is perfectly OK as age of consent obviously presents problems of logic and real-life applicability.
“How many of you are there, Eva?“
Not many.
1. In the late 70s there was a concerted effort to eliminate the age of consent. Look it up. What killed that movement was AIDS.
2. Stay away from fucking kids.
There's a big difference between the age of sexual maturity and the age of emotional maturity. And apparently, some people don't get it or ever get there.
Boo hoo. 60 year old guys can’t fuck the under 18 crowd anymore.
" Trying to draw the line that 15 years, 364 days is illegal but 16 is perfectly OK as age of consent obviously presents problems of logic and real-life applicability."
Right.... or 15 years 363, or 15 years 362 days, or 15 years 361 days.... or 12 years 3 days... or 9 years 11 days.
Sweet Baby Jesus can there be NO standards, none at all?
I got a little over half way through. No amount of high powered California sin semilla could make it seem deep or insightful.
Frank O'Hara would have been 100 this year.
--- 60 year old guys can’t fuck the under 18 crowd anymore.
So melodramatic, Eva! Speaking for myself (cough, ahem, etc.), I don't need or want a crowd. One 17-year-old woman could do the job. Assuming my wife likes her.
It's people like Allen Ginsberg who ruined California.
Men are strongly attracted to fertile women. Women with a thin even layer of subcutaneous baby fat are the neon Times Square projecting fertility. Ironically, due to our modern diets that includes lots of hormones and hormones stimulating foods, girls end up maturing physically at a much earlier age these days being emotionally and intellectually immature.
As modern men, We are required to use our civilized software to overcome our hardwired reproductive instincts. Life isn't fair or easy.
“One 17-year-old woman could do the job. Assuming my wife likes her.”
lol
It’s interesting that you disparage me and at the same time hide behind your wife.
Poor modern men.
I don't get most poetry. Especially this guy's.
I'm a professional writer and kind of smart, but I don't get poetry.
I read the words that
Read me back
We mean nothing to each other
But despise each other's existence.
Simple thoughts invade my pen
But I've no time to rhyme.
...that veggie poem stuff was sure driven off the rails here, huh?
Don't feel sorry for us, Eva. We will never suffer the indignity of being a menopausal cat lady choking on hairballs and sweating like a pig under the covers at night. Your reward for putting up with the monthly curse.
Let me amplify my point. It’s almost a cliche. Guys using older women as a shield. Epstein with Ghislaine always by his side. The subtle message that was being conveyed - this older woman isn’t saying anything - so it must be ok.
---- It’s interesting that you disparage me and at the same time hide behind your wife. [Eva Marie]
Memo to self: don't waste time trying to joke with Eva Marie. I forgot once already.
--- Let me amplify
Aargh!
@Howard: Wounded to the quick . . . Anyway.
lol. I love “let me amplify”
The great photographer Vivian Maier was also born today.
Allen Ginsberg never did it for me. He’s OK but forgettable. Walt Whitman overwhelms this poem. And Garcia Lorca makes a trivial cameo. This poem presages the name-checking that too often happens in hip-hop.
Randall Jarrell had his own supermarket poem a few years later.
Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens. ...
Way to bring out the pedophiles. Ginsberg belonged in prison, and the acceptance of him by certain academic types simply amplifies the grotesqueries of modern academia. He bragged about fucking children. I once moved in a few established poetry circles, and he did things far worse than any of those quisling "rebels" would deign to report to the police, though they loved to giggle about them while swilling wine. What a bunch of pathetic people. I will not look past his role in helping found NAMBLA, nor his Naropa University of Pedopheliacs, which was every bit as predatory as it sounds and could not have been if there were one slightly moral academic in the room.
The Howl genre is just embarrassing if you're older than 17, doubly so when it's about shoplifting, the shitting upon poor grocery employees and store owners' main excuse for keeping their salaries low.
I wish I were half as cavalier as rejham. That is Found Poetry.
How touching that pineapples are challenging.
Academics have pensions and benefits. The guy who got there at 4a.m. to root out the rotting ones, haul huge heavy boxes to replace them, and hose down the display can't afford them.
I was that guy. Choke on your fruit cups. The only war is the class war.
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