Analysis Of Howl By Allen Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Allen Ginsberg. The famous Beat writer haunts my own supermarket as Whitman does his. It is difficult to read Howl and Other Poems without succumbing to the vein of defeat running throughout its pages. It is difficult to stop yourself from throwing your hands up in surrender to Ginsberg’s “Moloch.” It is also difficult to read Ginsberg on an empty stomach. Throughout his poems Ginsberg references again and again the ideas of hunger, starvation, fruits, vegetables, soups, meats, eggs etc. I will be focusing on two poems in particular, “A Supermarket in California” and “Howl,” and explaining how Ginsberg uses symbols of nourishment and malnourishment to not only explore the sort of sustenance his generation
Which on one hand seems to be a reference to the already established capitalist supermarket, asking the worth of sustenance, but also brings the food symbolism a new sexual nature. Kearful even states that “Supermarket” is “a fantasy of gay poetic bonding in which Whitman is mentally present from the outset.” Much like “Howl” Ginsberg admits that he is in a state of “hungry fatigue” and is searching for something. It is in this supermarket that he finds Whitman and Lorca, both homosexual poets like himself. In the article Supermarket Sociology David J. Alworth claims that “the supermarket in the poem thus mediates a transhistorical homosocial and homosexual bond, and food objects enable a certain triangulation of desire that is erotic, yet emphatically nonconsumerist.” The phallic symbol of the banana sexualizes all the food in the store. The bright colors and “brilliant stacks of cans” become erotic and thoughts that Ginsberg has about Whitman become erotic as well, but the sexual nature of the food seems unattainable to the outcast poets. As mentioned earlier, the aisles are already occupied by the heteronormal, nuclear families, husbands, wives, children, and the three “fruits,” (Whitman, Ginsberg and Lorca) are forced to haunt the supermarket, ghostlike, only finding solace in each other’s presence. Ginsberg describes this as a “solitary fancy.” The isolation also goes back to the first sighting of Whitman. The poet is
Ben Lee explains in his article Howl and Other Poems: Is There Old Left in These New Beats that “Without question, Ginsberg maintained throughout his life a deep attachment to the ideals and organizations of the prewar left. His mother, Naomi Ginsberg, was a dedicated communist,” and that he even vacationed “at a Yiddish-American summer camp where ‘the adults debated ideology’ and ‘pictures of the enemy—capitalists and socialists with exaggerated features, blood dripping from their hands—lined the walls of the mess halls.’” It is precisely this prewar leftist ideal that comes through. Lee states that “He attacks white-collar culture without hesitation and, not surprisingly for a poet who identified himself as bohemian, he seeds his Beat poems with heroic images of the lumpen proletariat: musicians, bums, junkies, and other "angels" of Skid Row.” In “A Supermarket in California” we see the image of Federico Garcia Lorca, an artist and political martyr who died at the hands of the Spanish Nationalists. Ginsberg also celebrates the lowly “grocery boys” who Whitman eyes so wantonly. Whitman even asks, “Who killed the pork chops?” which would be a celebration of the workingman or the