NPM: Day 9

This link from Tabatha Yeatts' blog is one I've had open since last May. It's not a poetry link, but an art one - go on, click on over and look. It's about the color blue, and I was so taken by the image and idea of a cyanometer - a tool developed in the eighteenth century by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure to measure the shades of blue scientifically. I wanted - and still do want - to write something about that. But I am closing the link, and just writing "cyanometer" in my list of writing ideas.

Fortunately, many others have written about the color blue. I went looking, and here are some of the ones I found that I liked best:

"Blue," by Sidney Wade
An excerpt:

we watch a cormorant
whose eye is ringed
in blue diamonds,
a shimmering lure,
and we love this blue
and this dark bird
and this deepening sky
that pinks and hums
in the west

"The Blue," by Camille T. Dungy is a wonderful narrative poem about the discovery of a butterfly called the Smith Blue, and what happened to the scientists who discovered it.

"Kind of Blue," by Lynn Powell, is also wonderful, and the link includes a recording of the poet reading it. This one may be the most appropriate to the cyanometer because it talks about varying shades of blue. I tried to excerpt it but I can't - go read it all! It's short!

Tabatha inspires me often with the poems and art that she posts on her blog, The Opposite of Indifference. She finds the most amazing things in her journeys, and writes her own original poems beautifully too. She edited Imperfect, an anthology in which I have a poem. And for NPM, she produced a new treasure, "Poetry in the Halls," a free printable to print out and put up on the wall. These poems are on the middle school and high school hallway walls in our school in Haiti - thanks, Tabatha! This week, she produced even more printables for poetry teachers. You can see that post here.

Today's line of the Progressive Poem is here.