Grocery rhymes: how poetry has flourished in supermarket aisles

After a couple of students used a sonnet to take a swipe at Tesco, we look back at the often strained relationship between poets and superstores

• Kathryn Bromwich - The Observer, Sunday 30 November 2014

Taste the difference: even beat poet Allen Ginsberg pronounced on the supermarket. Photograph: CSU Archives/Everett Collect/REX

In 1956, Allen Ginsberg’s poem A Supermarket in California placed famous poets in supermarket aisles: “Wives in the/avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what/were you doing down by the watermelons?” Back then, the unlikely union of supermarkets and poetry was both literally and figuratively like chalk (used to write poetry on boards) and cheese (available from all good supermarkets). This week, the two worlds have collided again
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