Compare and contrast

I was delighted to read “Songs of Ourselves,” [April 16], but I was surprised Christopher Reynolds didn’t acknowledge Allen Ginsberg’s wonderful poem “A Supermarket in California.” In it, Ginsberg imagines trailing Walt Whitman through the aisles of a grocery store as the older poet eyes the shop boys and asks, “Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?” Toward the end of the poem, Ginsberg follows Whitman out into the night and addresses him as “dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage teacher.”

I doubt Ginsberg would have wanted to be seen in competition with Whitman, but I imagine he would have been tickled to share these column inches with his poetic father, his fellow gorgeously long-winded teacher.

GAYLE BRANDEIS

Riverside