Someone Is Strategically Placing Poems Around a British Supermarket

If they’re lucky, shoppers at the Tesco supermarket in Coventry, UK may be able to pick up some poetry in addition to their milk and eggs. The Coventry Telegraph reports that a mysterious visitor has left carefully selected poems around the store.

Two poems printed on plain paper have been discovered in the grocery store so far. The first, "Bread," by modern American poet W.S. Merwin, was placed in the baked goods aisle. The opening stanza reads:

Each face in the street is a slice of bread wandering on searching

The second poem was "Deer" by another American poet, Kenneth Rexroth:

Deer are gentle and graceful and they have beautiful eyes. They hurt no one but themselves […] Men have invented several Thousand ways of killing them.

That poem was discovered in the meat section on top of some venison.

A verse-loving perpetrator has yet to come forward, but this may not be their first offense. In December 2016, notes telling customers that they "don’t need these chemicals" and to "stop counting calories! YOU LOOK GREAT" were found on boxes of diet products in the same grocery store.

Similar examples of poetry vigilantism have also been reported elsewhere in the UK. In 2015 an optimistic poem titled "Worst Day Ever?" appeared without explanation in a bar in North London, and around the same time someone calling himself "M Jones" or "composer Mark Jones" (coined by others "The Banksy of Poetry") began sending romantic poems to hairdressers in Wales. Whether these incidents are somehow related or just examples of Britain’s love of poetry remains a mystery.