Journal over "Supermarket in California"

-2-3 quotes you underlined or highlighted

1. “ Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

2. “ Will we walk all night through solitary streets?

3. “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon”

-Sensory details that stood out to you as a reader

            There were a lot of sensory details that stood out to me as a reader because of how she wrote. She wrote with a lot of questions and her questions related to sensory details that she would describe. She starts off in the second paragraph by saying, “ In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations.” In this particular sentence she brought a lot of thinking into her sensory detail and she made the point to add “neon” into her sentence to describe the sign to add a little spark to her paper. Later on in the story she says, “ Childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.” When I first read this I thought of an older poor man, who struggles to get around at the grocery store eyeing the employees to see if they were around to see if he could get away with stealing the produce. I don’t know if that is it for sure but that is what I understood it as.  Also by reading this sentence, you now have a picture who Walt William is and what he looks like.

-Observations about the writer's style, with examples from the text

            I observed right off the bat that Allen likes to use a lot of rhetorical questions in his writing to show ideas that the character is having or what the character is thinking about.  They have a lot of different questions such as…” Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home in our silent cottage?” “ Will we walk all night through solitary streets?” These lines weren’t also questions they were also questions that did not relate to what was going on at all. They were kind of questions that just rambled on to get a point across.

-A thoughtful personal response to the content of the piece

            I really like how this poem was written. It was quick and too the point.  They had random questions thrown in to the story like… “ are you my angel?” and they have a lot of sensory detail that helps me picture the setting that these events were taking place in.

-Any questions the piece raised for you as a reader

            I would like to know why he wrote this poem and why is it a “Supermarket in California” and why is it California over any other state.