Need help with Beat poet

[vkbrasby]

I haven't read much of the Beat poets and am having a hard time understanding some poems by Allen Ginsberg. Could someone please help me out? The ones I'm struggling with are "A Supermarket in California" and "America." Thanks!

[Dark Muse]

Ugh, I cannot say that I care for Ginsberg to be quite honest, and America, I think is questionable as a poem, to me it more of a rant that belongs as part of a diary entry.

But my personaly feelings aside, here is what background information I can give you about the poem.

When the poem was published by 1956, Mcarthy had already been discredited but the memory of his anti-communist witch-hunts stifled political dissent. Ginsberg himself was born of a Russian immigrant and a freverant member of the communist party. The Trotskyites mentioned in the poem were millitant American Communists. The Wobblies were members of the Individual Workers of the World, a radical labor orginization, many of whose members were imprisoned during "Red Scare"

Tom Mooney was a labor orginizer who was condemed to death on purjured evidence that he had let off a bomb during a San Francisco parade. He managed to escape the death pentalty and was freed after 23 years in prison. But Sccao and Vanzetti were executed in 1927 after what accounted to a political trial.

During the 1930s the American Communist Party was able to take part openly in political campaigns and orginized support for Mooney.

The Scottsboro boys were eight blacks who were condemed to death after a sensational and unfair rape trail in Scottsboro, Alabama.

Those are a few background notes on some of the refreances in the poem which may help your understanding, but overall the poem is a critisisim of the American Government and American Polices, as well as dealing with issues of rascim in society.

[Dark Muse]

A Supermarket in California is a comentary on comercialism, and supply and demand. At the time the poem was written the idea of the Supermarket, or Grocery store was still rather rare and unusual, and many states did not have such things, they were not nearly as common as they are today. The idea of being able to have fruit that was out of season, was unheard of before. As well as having such a wide varity of things to choose from.

As well in the days of Walt Whitman, a Romantic Poet there was no such thing as a Supermarket, and so I think Ginsberg is just reflecting on how things have changed, and what would the poets of the past have thought if they had lived to see such things like a supermarket.

It is a sort of morning for an age that is lost and the way in which times are changing and a somewhat ominous voice upon those changes.

[vkbrasby]

Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it. I didn't care much for the poet myself, but it helps to understand it a bit more. Thanks!

[Dark Muse]

No problem, glad to help

[jon1jt]

Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it. I didn't care much for the poet myself, but it helps to understand it a bit more. Thanks!


Keep reading him and be assured that someday he'll sound his barbaric yawp in your ear too. ;)