In his video Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree (2012), Alec Soth reflects on artists across media who have influenced his practice. Soth takes his initial inspiration from the book Summer Nights (1985) by photographer Robert Adams, a work that he credits with stirring him to begin photographing at night. He ends the piece with an excerpt from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California,” in which Ginsberg invokes the poet Walt Whitman. In this post, curatorial intern Esther Mathieu ’17 picks up this thread, looking at this web of influences as well as her own inspirations as a poet and photographer.
Allen Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California,” while it references and reveres Walt Whitman in its dreamlike visit to a supermarket, is not a Whitman poem. With its exuberant invocation of self and world, it exhibits some of the Leaves of Grass grandeur so strongly associated with Whitman. Every poet, every artist, lives in the shadows of those practitioners she most admires, those whose works have illuminated the world for her. Whitman is that for so many American poets, the voice we look to for a sense of what great poetry can be. He may not have invented free verse, but he certainly brought it to new heights and new consciousness. What would our poetry be without him? And what would his poetry be like if he were living now? These are our preoccupations, our obsessions, and they can be devastating or they can be hopeful, depending on the hour or the day.
Ginsberg has become another of those voices for American poets. Whether you like him or not, you have to acknowledge the importance of his writing. So it is in some way exhilarating to encounter him here, desperate and self-conscious, in conversation with another great voice. How, really, would you talk to Walt Whitman if you could? What could you say to him that was new and exciting and worthwhile, and how would you quash that feeling of being oh-so-small in comparison?
For the exhibit Aperture Remix, artists made new work in response to publications that had been significant for them. Photographer Alec Soth made a short film called Summer Nights at the Dollar Tree, a response to Robert Adams’s monograph Summer Nights. In the film, Soth quotes Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” and in his interview with Aperture he states:</p>
Ginsberg saved the day for me. “A Supermarket in California” clearly illustrates Whitman’s profound influence on Ginsberg, but Ginsberg’s voice rises above it. He sings with Whitmanesque bravado, but it’s still Ginsberg’s world. The poem wouldn’t work if Ginsberg had written about Civil War soldiers. He needed to use his own universe of neon supermarkets in order to say anything meaningful about Whitman.
As a poet myself, this is something I am still very much learning how to do. There are so many poems and poets that I love. But that tension between demonstrating my admiration for these writers—be it in tribute, mimicry, or more general conversation—and finding my own way is incredibly difficult. On being derivative, Soth says, “I think it is dangerous to obsess over this issue. It is better to grapple with your influences than run away from them.”
This issue of derivation is especially interesting when it begins to cross disciplines. Robert Adams, for example, is inspiring to me not only in my photography, but also in my poetry. And some of my favorite musicians and poets are inspiring to me as a visual artist. In some ways, it is almost easier to translate work across media—there is a certainty there that the result will be different from the inspiration. Within one discipline, though, there is a tightrope balance between learning the lessons laid out for us by our heroes and translating those lessons into original work without falling into the trap of simply following their art with something that is, for all intents and purposes, the same.
Ginsberg’s ability to recreate the sense of Whitman in a poem that is still utterly his own is what makes “A Supermarket in California” such a fantastic piece. To me, the most interesting parts of the poem are the questions he ascribes to Whitman—“Who killed the pork chops? What price/bananas? Are you my Angel?”—and the casual mention of fellow poet García Lorca in the first stanza, where he appears and disappears like a whisper. The poem is a half dream, a surreal and hazy reaching out to Whitman. Ginsberg says, “Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour.” Perhaps we do not ever know where we are going in our art. Perhaps we need the grounding of those who came before us to make any sense of the world at all. Perhaps we are just dreaming, “walk[ing] down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.”