Facing Down the Poem
Welcome to mid-December! I apologize for sending this out a little later today than planned. ‘Tis the season for errands, gusts of wind, checklists, and—arg, much as I don’t like to admit it—shopping. Whether it’s this sale or that, this gift or that, this grocery item or that, the pre-holiday season finds me waiting in supermarket lines and post office lines and then dashing to the next thing before I know it. Am I almost late or about to be late? What have I forgotten? What have I left behind? Who am I?
I came across Rebecca Hazelton’s poem “Sexy is the Least Interesting” in this month’s Poetry magazine and keep thinking about the way the speaker faces down another poem, Allen Ginsberg’s famous “A Supermarket in California.” The speaker of Ginsberg’s poem proclaims, “What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night!” (Ginsberg’s speaker is, in turn, imagining having an erotic encounter another poet of a previous era, Walt Whitman.) The speaker of Hazelton’s poem responds to this moment of Ginsberg’s poem, nodding to the conceit of Ginsberg’s poem while also tangling with its marvel and what might lie within it: