Day 19

"...one ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words." -Goethe

A poem for this cold spring day: "In Cold Spring Air" by Reginald Gibbons. Consider the choices the poet made in structuring this poem. Written as prose, the lines look like this:

In cold spring air the white wisp-visible breath of a blackbird singing -- 
we don't know to unwrap these blindfolds we keep thinking we are seeing through

Arranged as poetry, they are so much more meaningful because of how the line breaks draw attention to the exciting ways words can transform into images in our minds. The poem slows down our reading pace and in doing so, compels us to remove the "blindfolds" of how we typically look at things. Try rearranging a sentence or two that you've written about something you observe outside.

In cold spring air

In cold
          spring air the
white wisp-
          visible
breath of
          a blackbird
singing—
          we don’t know
to un-
          wrap these blind-
folds we
          keep thinking
we are
          seeing through

A song to commemorate the official opening of the Eiffel Tower (31 March 1889): "Alec Eiffel" by Boston's own Pixies. The Pixies' albums on 4AD (Surfer Rosa; Doolittle; Bossanova; Trompe Le Monde) are all indie-rock classics.

Works Cited

Gibbons, Reginald. "In cold spring air." Poets.org. https://poets.org/lesson-plan/teach-poem-cold-spring-air-reginald-gibbons. Accessed 31 Mar. 2020.

Pixies. "Alec Eiffel." Trompe Le Monde, 1991, 4AD.