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Getting the High Bush Cranberries

Getting the High Bush Cranberries

I looked up suddenly and the sky
was full of them, sky
was on fire with them.

Following her directions I find
the purple maple
walk the mosslog
deeper into the bush
veer at the rushes
test for sinkholes
crawl the rabbitdropping undergrowth
straighten up
and the sky is full of them, sky
is on fire with them.

(got the fence up here
a long story
so it’s beginning
to look like Story Book Farm
after all
after a lot of work
also we’ve been laying in
crab-apple jelly
wild-grape jam
wild-cranberry & the like
and Arthur was into the chokecherries
for the wine also
I brandied some wild-plums
which I will never do again
as you have to pierce each
dratted little plum
with a needle
it’s so nice to be settled in
Do come & see us)

The Lake is directly in front of me but
High Bush Cranberries swaying muddle up
locations:   dis
mayme:      dis
turbme:      dis
locate

years of the instinctive glance
for bears over the shoulder
I begin picking, shouting
out to Burning Lake:

This is only Watergate Year
It’s not Year Whole World on Fire
Not that Year yet.

Colleen Thibaudeau, 1974

“Getting the High Bush Cranberries” is from The Artemesia Book (1991), available from Brick Books.

High bush cranberry photo courtesy Northern Ontario Plant Database: http://www.northernontarioflora.ca/description.cfm?speciesid=1005371

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Il palloncino di Colleen Thibaudeau

Thrilled to discover this Italian version of Colleen Thibaudeu’s concrete poem “Balloon”!

“Il palloncino” is part of the online children’s collection of filastrocche.it: https://www.filastrocche.it/contenuti/il-palloncino-6/

(The poem first appeared in Italian in 2000 for the collection Tante rime per bambini published by Mondadori.)

“Balloon” is from Thibaudeau’s 1965 book of concrete poems Lozenges: Poems in the Shapes of Things.

“Balloon” celebrated in 2012

In April 2012, a giant version of “Balloon” was displayed on a billboard near Stanley Street and Wortley Road in London, Ontario. The billboard was a joint project of Poetry London, London Public Library, and Brick Books, in celebration of National Poetry Month.

April 4, 2012: As big as ball, as round as sun…

“Balloon” also appears in
The Wind Has Wings: Poems From Canada (1968, Oxford University Press) and
A Poke In The I — A Collection of Concrete Poems (2001, Candlewick Press).

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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”.)

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Colleen Thibaudeau featured in Women in Concrete Poetry 1959-1979

“Bell” by Colleen Thibaudeau (1965)

Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979, a new collection from visual arts publisher Primary Information, includes Colleen Thibaudeau’s concrete poems from her 1965 book Lozenges: Poems in the Shapes of Things. 

Inspired by Italian artist Mirella Bentivoglio’s exhibition of visual and concrete poetry by women at the 1978 Venice Biennale, editors Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre have brought together 50 writers and artists from 17 countries to trace women’s use of this form during the period.

Women in Concrete Poetry 1959-1979 brings together a range of graphic, textual, and photographic approaches to poetic works: https://primaryinformation.org/product/women-in-concrete-poetry-1959-1979/

Thibaudeau’s earlier work used free verse forms, and an interest in concrete poetry came perhaps from her French literature studies and poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s (1880-1918) Calligrammes:

The Calligrammes are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph. [Apollinaire in a letter to André Billy, 1916] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligrammes

Conceived as a small format book, Lozenges: Poems in the Shapes of Things draws on everyday themes and objects from children’s lives – bell, ball, hockey stick, balloon – and invites readers old and young to discover the picture the words make.

“Balloon” by Colleen Thibaudeau (1965)

View the original Lozenges poems here: https://colleenthibaudeau.com/2013/11/26/lozenges-poems-in-the-shapes-of-things/

Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979 is available from PrimaryInformation.org
https://primaryinformation.org/product/women-in-concrete-poetry-1959-1979/

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Poem: “The Boy Actors”

The Boy Actors

She held her part,
(Though knew the lines by heart)
But the others hovering in the wings
Obscured sure things.

She let a page fall (no hurt)
To pleach her skirt.
Truly the part made her head whirl
To act-a-girl act-a-boy act-a-girl.

Colleen Thibaudeau, 1945

“The Boy Actors”, written during Thibaudeau’s university days, appeared in Alphabet, Issue 1, 1960 under the pseudonym M. Morris.

1957, Winnipeg, Manitoba: Colleen Thibaudeau with her husband James Reaney.

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Colleen Thibaudeau’s “Sea Gone Girl”

Sea Gone Girl

The sea gone girl is all at sea
Stockings rolled below the knee,
Careless slung the dishtowel hung
Cat got its parting scatscatscat,–
For her the very breeze of a Marine
Was signal for abandoning.

The screendoor bangs, the little street
Is window-wide a-buzz with her retreat:
She makes it to the sad hotel
Is keel-hauled by the firebell pull
In lobby; then she rises to the tropic
Islands rolling home in beer and frolic.

Others have that bleached hair, part ‘done’
Part rendered just uncombable by wind & sun,
Others wear fishnet gowns in this and other towns,
Have nails like Turner sunsets going down,
Knuckles that are wrinkled as a fishwife’s bum,
Have voices stored in shells that make a deepsea hum.

But who else has three captive princesses
Mild-mannered, magical, wearing middy dresses?
The six-year-old has her bath drawn ready,
The seven-year-old holds the coffee-pot steady,
& the eight-year-old draws the net of her nightdress over her head
And casts the sea gone mother into bed.

Colleen Thibaudeau, 1957

“Sea Gone Girl” can be found in The Artemesia Book (1991), available from Brick Books.

((( o ))) Listen to Peggy Roffey read the poem here.

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“Voicing Colleen” at the London Public Library

 

Voicing Colleen at the London Public LIbrary: James Stewart Reaney and Susan Reaney (Colleen’s children) read Thibaudeau’s poem “Looking at The Artemesia Book”. (All photos from this event are  by Cameron Paton.)

Thank you all for joining us on Monday May 7th at the The London Public Library‘s Stevenson & Hunt Room for “Voicing Colleen” — an evening of poetry by Colleen Thibaudeau.

Host Peggy Roffey chose 33 of Thibaudeau’s poems read by  a choir of voices — some solo, some shared, some with the audience. Unique to this evening was the chance to hear the ten poems in Thibaudeau’s elegiac sequence “Ten Letters” read by ten different voices.

Voicing Colleen: Jean McKay leads on “I do not want only” accompanied by Kelly Creighton, Angie Quick, Kelly McConnell, Koral Scott, Brittany Renaud, Susan Wallace, and Susan Reaney.

Angie Quick reads Colleen Thibaudeau’s poem “The Rose Family”.

Thank you Peggy Roffey for organizing this event and inviting an intergenerational group of readers to voice Colleen’s work — Patricia Black, Kelly Creighton, Carolyn Doyle, Kelly McConnell, Jean McKay, Angie Quick, Brittany Renaud, and Koral Scott, along with members of Colleen Thibaudeau’s family — her son James Stewart Reaney, daughter-in-law Susan Wallace, and daughter Susan Reaney.

Voicing Colleen: Left to right: Patricia Black and Kelly Creighton enjoy Susan Reaney and James Stewart Reaney reading “Looking at The Artemesia Book”.

Special thanks to the London Public Library and Carolyn Doyle for including Colleen Thibaudeau in the “Women Trailblazers” series celebrating Canadian women writers. The series concludes on Monday May 28 at 7 pm with Judy Rebick and Penn Kemp reading from their new books.

Brick Books has three titles by Colleen Thibaudeau: The Martha Landscapes (1984), Ten Letters (1975), and The Artemesia Book (1991), which are also available in e-book versions.

 

 

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My granddaughters are combing out their long hair

My granddaughters are combing out their long hair

my granddaughters are combing out their long hair sitting at night
on the rocks in Venezuela       they have watched their babes
falling like white birds from the last of the treetop cradles
they have buried them in their hearts where they will never forget
to keep on singing them the old songs

brought down to earth they use twigs, flint scrapers acadian
their laughter underground makes the thyme flower in darkness

my granddaughters are thin as fishbones & hornfooted but they are
always beautiful under the stars: like little asian paperthings
they seem to open outward into their own waterbowl

mornings they waken to Light’s chink ricocheting
off an old Black’s Harbour sardinecan.

Reduce them the last evangelines make them part of the stars.

my granddaughters are coming out by night combing their burr
coloured hair by the rocks and streamtrickle in Venezuela
they are burnt out as falling stars but they laugh
and keep on singing them the old songs.

Colleen Thibaudeau, 1977

“My granddaughters are combing out their long hair” is from The Artemesia Book (1991), available from Brick Books.

( ( (o) ) ) Listen to Peggy Roffey read the poem here.

Colleen Thibaudeau in London, Ontario, Summer 1977

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Colleen Thibaudeau’s “Letter Eight”

Letter Eight

Place was that piece of ground between house and swing,
yielding to the foot,
covered with reddened strawberry leaves
and that small vine that isn’t wintergreen.

Among the cedars, some of them struggling still like old limbo dancers,

covered with a lighter green lichen,

there on the day that William Faulkner died I came and stood
and even if I had not willed it so, down my head would have gone down,

thinking definitely about something:
God, how I love this little part of ground.

Colleen Thibaudeau, 1974

Near Jericho Beach, Vancouver, BC February 2017
Near Jericho Beach, February 2017

“Letter Eight” is from Colleen Thibaudeau’s elegiac sequence Ten Letters (1975) available from Brick Books. The Ten Letters sequence also appears in The Artemesia Book (1991).

((( ο )))  Listen to Jean McKay read “Letter Eight” here.

Colleen Thibaudeau, Summer 1977 in London, Ontario
Colleen Thibaudeau, Summer 1977 in London, Ontario