Analysis of the Poem "A Supermarket in California" begins with Ginsberg recounting a particular vision he had one night while living in Berkeley, California.
He opens by setting the scene: he is walking down a street, under trees and a full moon, having "thoughts" of Walt Whitman. For Ginsberg, the setting is important here. He feels pulled by two sides of life, one represented by the urban landscape of Berkeley and the Bay Area, the sęcond is the natural world symbolised by the trees and the moon. These symbols remind him of Whitman, who sought to find a truer world and identity in nature. Ginsberg, with a "headache" and in a "hungry fatigue" that is part physical and part spiritual, who is looking for solace from the existential crisis he is facing, wanders into what he terms as a "neon/fruit supermarket".
He is “dreaming" of Whitman's "enumerations", meaning that he hopes the supermarket will hold a glimpse of the world Whitman spoke of in his poetry. Ginsberg is looking to history to help him answer he economic and social questions that his modern world has posed. The term "neon" a harsh false light, foreshadows the inevitable lisappointment that the reader knows Ginsberg will find. The second stanza begins Ginsberg's imaginative encounter with Walt Whitman. Ginsberg claims that "I saw Nhitman...poking/among the meats...and eyeing the grocery boys". Ginsberg means these. lines to be a double entendre, "poking among the neats" being a crude term for male intercourse and "eyeing the grocery oys" an acknowledgement for Whitman's alleged sexual fondness for "oung boys. Ginsberg continues the sexual imagery in lines eleven and welve when he claims that Whitman asked "Who killed the pork chops?/ Vhat price bananas? Are you my Angel?" These lines use supermarket magery to denote a primal kind of sexuality, rooted in nature but astardised by the profit motive of industrialised society. But they also ose questions of eccnomics. In Whitman's day, it would have been atural for the consumer of food to know where the food came from, ho killed it and how it got to their table.
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