At the first of the year I was thinking of Walt Whitman and New York, and then somehow wandered over to the West Coast with Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco. I wonder which poem(s) Ginsberg had in mind when he wrote this line in “A Supermarket in California” (1955), “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.”
Several sources say Ginsberg is responding to Whitman’s “Song of Myself (1855), which begins, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
One of my favorite poetic lists appears in Ginsberg’s “Supermarket.” I don’t want to spoil anything if you haven’t read the poem yet, but the list includes avocados, peaches, and García Lorca. Speaking of whom, I should mention that the Spanish poet, too, paid homage to WW in “Ode to Walt Whitman”; an English translation appeared in Poetry in 1955. (Ben Belitt was the translator.)
¡Hay mas! There’s more. If you have a New Yorker subscription, you can read Ariel Francisco’s modern-day ode to García Lorca’s ode: “Along the East River and in the Bronx Young Men Were Singing” (March 11, 2019). I recommend Francisco’s book A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship, and want to read his others.
This Whitman chasing just might be endless. The next stop found me in Chile, with Martín Espada’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to Walt Whitman,” over at the University of Pennsylvania publication Jacket 2. I love these short lines. “But/your voice/sings/in the train stations/on the edge of town.”
Given the news lately, I recommend following a poet around for a while. Doing so sure helped my state of mind.
The Poetry Friday roundup on January 23rd at Tabatha Yeatts’ place, The Opposite of Indifference. On February 20th, I’m going to try a prompt and post a Whitman-inspired poem, too. Please join me if you would like to! The details are here.
Photo by Susan Thomsen. Sheep Meadow, Central Park, 2019.
Chicken Spaghetti 
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