Poetry News

Thievery and other literary pursuits

By Harriet Staff

In his extremely questionable poem “Song of Fairies Robbing an Orchard,” Leigh Hunt notes:

Stolen sweets are always sweeter,
Stolen kisses much completer,
Stolen looks are nice in chapels,
Stolen, stolen, be your apples.

Like Eve, he had to mention the apples.

If old Leigh were alive and stealing today, he’d be sneaking through the shelves at Border’s (too soon?), on the hunt for titles by Bukowski and Burroughs. Those authors’ books are among the most frequently pilfered, according to a Publishers’ Weekly roundup.

The piece quotes a New York Observer article:

But when I called up a Barnes & Noble to see if they had a couple of Bukowski titles I was looking for, one of the clerks told me that in order to check I’d have to call one of the cashiers, because all of the Bukowskis had been removed from the open shelves and were kept on a shelf behind the cashier’s desks–out of reach, in other words, of shoplifters.

Steal a glance at the roundup by clicking here.

Posted in Poetry News on Tuesday, July 19th, 2011 by Harriet Staff.