portrayal of the evolution of society is shown within the lines, "I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas?" In Whitman's day, he would have known the answer to those questions because back then, one would go to the farmer directly to get the products unlike the modern American supermarkets where one does not know where the products come from. Describing the relationship between Ginsberg and Whitman in "Howl" and "A Supermarket in California", Byrne R.S. Fone states that sexuality, specifically homosexuality, plays a key role in the poem's presentation of reality: "Not since Whitman had an American homosexual poet dared to intimate, let alone announce, that joy not pain was the result of homosexual rape and to suggest that sex not philosophy might be the most powerful weapon against oppression." Burns adds that the use of Lorca and Whitman is intended to show the counter-cultural aspects of Ginsberg's art. The poetry of Lorca and Whitman, to Burns, express a value system that contradicts everything the modern supermarket represents. Whereas "love" is what America represents in the works of previous poets, the America of Ginsberg's poetry is best presented through poetical references to "supermarkets and automobiles". Critic Nick Selby, in an essay titled "Queer Shoulders to the Wheel: Whitman, Ginsberg, and a Bisexual Poetics", suggests that the poem presents sexuality as one of several opposing forces in the novel. Selby states that the binary opposites of heterosexuality and homosexuality function in the poem in the same manner as other opposites that make up the major themes of the work: capitalism vs. communism, American vs. Unamerican, and counterculture vs. culture. He adds that Ginsberg ironically uses the setting of the supermarket to show how mainstream culture forces conformity upon the consumer, highlighting the "radical sexuality" of the poet and putting it into a broader social context. Notes References Bowlby, Rachel. Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping. "A Supermarket in California". Columbia University Press 2002 Pockell, Leslie. The 100 Best Poems of All Time. Warner Books 2001 Burns, Allan Douglas. Thematic Guide to American Poetry. Greenwood Publishing Group 2002 Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. "A Supermarket in California". Ed. William Carlos Williams. City Lights Books 2000 Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. Oxford University Press US, 1996 Whitman, Walt. and Ezra Greenspan. Walt Whitman's "Song of myself". Routledge 2005 Marshall, Ian.Story Line. University