Wes Whitman

Yesterday in my English 204 class, we were discussing Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California,"* a poem in which Ginsberg imagines moving through a dreamlike supermarket with Walt Whitman. The student responsible for leading discussion of the poem had put together a pretty cool Power Point presentation, complete with an image of Walt Whitman. Call me crazy (and I know you will), but I was struck by how much Whitman, who you know I love, bears a resemblance to someone else close to my heart, especially in this picture:



Do you see it, too? Is this just one more sign of how perfect a cat Wes is for me? Or have I been spending entirely too much time thinking about nineteenth-century American literature?

*clicking on this link will bring you to a site where you can also hear Ginsberg read the poem. Pretty cool. He isn't an amazing reader, but it's always neat to hear poets read their own work.