I know I probably shouldn't this say but it needs to be said. I struggled through this poem. Not because I thought it particular difficult, but rather because I found it terribly repetitive. The need for this repetition was not lost on me, but 11 pages of it was. Interest was quickly lost and I had to keep rereading portions due to a growing lack of focus.
As for the poem itself, I will now attempt to decipher what I think it was about. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by/ madness, starving hysterical naked..." This is how the poem starts off. Instantly putting us into a negative mood progressively worsened throughout the poem., He goes on to describe his generation of great minds in what he sees they have become: "who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York" (p 11), "who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts" (p 12), and "who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music" (p 15). Ginsberg seems to be talking of what he saw traveling through the United States, watching all the people in the streets wasting away their greatness on drugs and sex. People who didn't fit in. Despair might be a proper word to describe this Part I.
In Part II, Ginsberg uses Moloch, a Philistine God to describe the cause of the misery and disconnectedness. Moloch was the Sun god of the Ammonites and was all together malevolent. They sacrificed first-borns in order to keep on his good side. "Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!" (p 21). He uses the very negative worship of Moloch to describe the very negative worship of all things wrong in the US. Talk of sobbing army boys and weeping old men caused by a worship of the wrongs.
In Part III, Ginsberg addresses Carl Solomon, a friend who is also a writer. "Where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter" (p 24). This part takes a slight turn. Despair is also combined not with hope, but with a sort of plea. "We hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep" (p 26). I think he is trying to say that we will keep trying to fix a sick nation, willing it to get better, and trying to relax it in its time of illness.
A Supermarket in California
This poem I found slightly more interesting. Maybe for its use of metaphor, or simply because it was shorter and less forgettable. This poem was apparently written while Ginsberg was high on peyote (as he was in Part II of HOWL). "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" (p 29). This poem is both of his adoration for Walt Whitman and an excellent metaphor of the US as a supermarket. It could have been a real hallucination brought on by the peyote, what he saw within these lines. "I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?" (p 29). He sees Walt Whitman as a companion, almost a friend. "Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?" (p 30). He is following Whitman, allowing Whitman to lead him to wherever it is Whitman thinks he should go. Sort of like a father might do for his son.
The last paragraph/sentence changing from this adoration of Whitman and description of US to a more grim desperation once more. "What America did you have..." (p 30), Ginsberg asks Whitman. Was Whitman's America any better than Ginsberg? Was it the America Ginsberg wishes his could now be?
-Mark
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