Poetry Hidden in Prose

You know the quotations I sometimes include in my posts? Here's the story:

Several decades ago I began the practice of copying lines from whatever I was reading, mostly from fiction—lines that resonated with an emotion, spoke to lived experience, captured my ear with their lyricism, made me laugh, brought tears to my eyes. 

For many years, those jottings landed on anything at hand—the back of an envelope, a receipt, a fragment torn from a paper bag.

By and by, I started a business called art❤️warmers, featuring small pieces of art and whimsy I created from found materials into which I'd incorporate selected lines.

Eventually, because I'd amassed so many unwieldy snippets, and because I was making such frequent use of the collection, I typed the quotations into an indexed database I use to this day.

Still later, I came to have a blog in which I sometimes gave space to one of those quotations.

Because those words felt like poetry hidden in prose, I began formatting the quotations as poems rather than as continuous text.

For example, instead of this:

This is what an artist is, she thought. This is the temperament you need to spend a whole day tinkering with a sentence, making sure both the meaning and the music are right; to spend three or seven or ten years working on a book,

this:

This is what an artist is, 

she thought. 

This is the temperament you need 

to spend a whole day 

tinkering 

with a sentence, 

making sure 

both the meaning 

and the music 

are right; 

to spend three 

or seven 

or ten years 

working on a book. 

    —Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening

Tinkering With a Sentence for Ten Years
4 x 8.5"; acrylic, ink, and oil pastel on drawing paper
abstract
2022