Going Straight Across the Lines then Down Each Column till it’s Finished

In this poem, Thibaudeau directs readers to read it in two ways to produce two unique poems:

(1)
One puddle in the lane looks clear down to Picardy
Sees worlds deep stones like red blood flowers white bones
Clear common brown drop lives washed (by) tears forever bones (in) Picardy.

(2)
One sees clear
puddle worlds common
in deep brown
the stones drop
lane like lives
looks red washed
clear blood (by) tears
down flowers forever
to white bones
Picardy bones (in) Picardy.

Markdale, Ontario in 1916: John Stewart Thibaudeau (Colleen’s father) with his mother, father, and youngest brother.

Written in 1968, “Going Straight Across the Lines then Down Each Column till it’s Finished” was first published in Air 13.14.15 in 1973 and then in The “Patricia” Album and other poems (1992), published by Moonstone Press.

Colleen Thibaudeau alludes to her father’s military service in France (1916-1919) in this note from The “Patricia” Album: “Not being from the Souwesto Region originally, I still see it as “other”. I am not surprised when I read in The London Free Press about “the men from Erieau”, some of whom would have been among those who looked down the lane to Picardy.”

Colleen Thibaudeau in Vancouver, BC, 1969. Photo by Pat Yeomans.

Thibaudeau’s use of free verse forms and concrete poetry came from her French literature studies at university. For example, French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) described the space around words and groupings of words in a free verse or prose poem as necessary separations that direct the reader’s movement through it, much like “… Music as it is heard at a concert….”:

“Quite a few techniques found [in Music] seem to me to belong to Letters, and so I pick them up. Let the genre become one like the symphony, little by little, beside the personal declamation, leaving ancient verse intact – I venerate it and attribute to it the empire of passion and of dream – while it would be the time to treat, preferably, as it follows naturally, subjects of pure and complex imagination or intellect, not to exclude them from Poetry – the unique source.”
Stéphane Mallarmé from the Preface to Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hazard / Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance (1897) [English translation by Mary Ann Caws, 1981].

(See also Colleen Thibaudeau’s 1973 poem “From Verlaine’s Impressions” – a transliteration of Paul Verlaine’s “Impression fausse”.)