Lights from the Highway sparser, softer now and the Gorst lights gone and their house gone away, just lost rib to new life in dark seas, just dark seven sleepers gone seasabout the foot of our hill, just the foot of the hill and a great cave opening up.
Lights from the glass cupboard !spark! the house dark; And it’s up to the glass cupboard now! It looms at James’ headheight, three paces from the kitchen sink, one from table, length approximately my armspan, crafted by an Albertan who loved the bush, the hills.
The Bay Highway kindles to blue Italian grotto glasses; and green glasses, safe-and-wide as Sweden; and cheap little ruby liqueurs sing; and cocktail Libbys supermart violent and fresh from fists that swung axes, pounded down a territory and rolled Malcolm Lowry into the soundmad surf dazzling no warning…
By an Albertan who loved the bush, the hills, who made this cupboard ark that tends the tides of dream. They light, they guard the house, glow like an icon of Mike Todd, thirty-odd glasses, touched off by random headlights moving toward the Bay.
Colleen (on the right) with a friend at the Broughdale skating rink, London, Ontario, January 1966.
Idea for an Elegy: Finished up for the Brinks
Behind St. Peters strolls the cinderpath
a hazy day and two nuns pass (I stand by):
One has a face like a freckled egg, Irish, and accented
I would say straight Sandwich or some border town;
the other older sallower Belgian-born from La Salette—
Joyful their four eyes soar and won’t cast down—
‘So many more gulls. So many strange gulls.
So many strange gulls. More since the Seaway …’
when they turn off toward the grotto it is as damp
as if they had dumped the grotto down on the riverbank.
Five o’clock
is calling the lost hours home:
Fly back! calls Middlesex
Right now! calls St. Peter’s
Bell towers take the time from glint of wings
clear up the Thames. My wheels are still silver
on the cinderpath … those gulls are abundant, beady eyes
that have taken in Detroit, insouciance of Montreal;
multitudes of gulls, freckled, fresh-starched,
travel creased or whatever
(So many strange gulls. Up from the Seaway.)
take up a sad calling:
Of Sylvia Plath. O Sylvia Plath.
Lady, in the country of my coming there will be lush peaches ripe on ev’ry tree. Ev’ry little cloud will glide clear as a magic lantern slide. The golden serpent sun will throw his body like a light lasso about the heart of each dark centre, to fashion flowers of strange splendour. You will fill your panier, lass, with blooms like ornamental glass You will hear their Christmas chime all the glorious summertime.
Colleen Thibaudeau, 1950
Composer John Beckwith set music to “Serenade” and entered it in the 1950 CBC Songwriting Contest. It won a prize and was performed on CBC Radio by Charles Jordan (baritone). “Serenade” was performed by Russell Braun (baritone) at the John Beckwith Songbook concert in March 2021.
Pamela Terry Beckwith, John Beckwith, and Colleen Thibaudeau (1960)
( ( 0 ) ) In this audio clip, soprano Katy Clark performs “Serenade” at Wordsfest November 5, 2023 in London, Ontario.
‘Going to be one hot summer for sure,’ said Uncle Willie who had set his heart on growing watermelons in a cindery patch at the very end of his Garden.
‘No one is going to look there for them.’ He told no one but us, planted them at night. Joyce and I biked sweatily out to our first job, tenderly
moved translucent baby cabbages, made little hats for them, carried water endlessly and longed for the promised crisp bite, the crisp juices
reviving, ‘turning us into real people’, he said. We were just at that turning point, thirteen years old; we dreamed of the watermelon promise.
He said they were ‘coming along nicely’, green taut, bulging over the hillside, as yet undiscovered by the boys. September came.
The boys came. One Saturday morning we saw yellowing leaves only and every watermelon gone. Yet the anticipation of the melon miracle
seemed to have turned us, Joyce and I, into ‘real people’. And we pondered this, purposely noisy with our milkshakes, solacing ourselves with second best.
Colleen Thibaudeau, 1989
“Watermelon Summer” is from The Artemesia Book (1991), available from Brick Books.
Long after the Watermelon Summer, Colleen and Joyce remained friends and Joyce grew up to be a talented artist. She once made a “bon voyage” cake (complete with arc de triomphe!) when Colleen left to teach in France.
Colleen Thibaudeau and Joyce Draper Coles, St. Thomas, Ontario, October 1950.
Joyce’s 1946 exhibition at Central Tech in Toronto
1946 painting by Joyce Draper Coles (1925-2020) of her Toronto neighbourhood
Mrs. Trott Mouse
black in the greyed-out time
Mrs. Trott Mouse
greyed-out in the blackness
Bell’s ringing:
go to sleep little prisoners
Bell’s ringing:
just go to sleep
No bad dreams now
Ne pensez qu’à vos amours
No bad dreams now
Des belles toujours
Big clear moonlight
snug snoring
Big clear moonlight
really
A shadow’s passing over
it’s gone black as an oven
A shadow’s passing over
Suddenly it’s morning.
Mrs. Trott Mouse
rose in the blue rays
Mrs. Trott Mouse
get up sleepyheads.
Colleen Thibaudeau, 1973
((( o ))) In this audio clip from 1997, Colleen Thibaudeau describes how she created her “transliteration” of Paul Verlaine’s “Impression fausse”:
Paul Verlaine’s “Impression Fausse”, Premier livre de poésie, page 76.
Thank you Peggy Roffey for reuniting the long lost copy of Premier livre de poésie with Colleen’s family and sharing the 1997 interview with Colleen Thibaudeau at “Voicing Colleen”.
Premier livre de poésie, published by Gautier-Languereau, 1970
From the Biographie des poètes, page 89:
VERLAINE (Paul) (1844-1896). C’est un des premiers grands poètes formés par l’école symboliste. Son oeuvre sincère, émouvante, est avant tout une musique et correspond bien au but des symbolistes qui était d’évoquer sensations et sentiments.
In this poem, Colleen Thibaudeau recalls a temporary job she had at the University of Toronto library in 1948 and an early encounter with the poet Margaret Avison (1918-2007), who worked at the order desk.
Came back from searching dental periodicals in the Russian translated into German stacks, Office was feathered over with soft acquisitions and Our Boss was pondering the Great Seal prior to attack on new Books. I asked for a change of task. ‘Four o’clock. Not a good time to start fresh. Try Boston. Try the French …’ Suddenly Margaret, at her desk, looking no different said, ‘Tether: end of.’ No word more, passed solitary angel out the gothic door.
Well, yes: Go up: go down. Try Boston. Work to rule. Came back from searching dental periodicals in the Russian translated into German stacks. Our Boss cooed ‘Migraine weather’ put away till tomorrow the Great Seal. Going home I passed through Chinatown and bought one of those pink folded-up flowers that once in water pulses like a throat, then skipped to ailing Maggie’s doorstep, Whistled something delightful to the tune of: ‘And particularly delightful is the story of the little old man who rode all over Moscow free because no one could change his hundred rouble note.’
Colleen Thibaudeau, 1978
More about Colleen Thibaudeau’s friendship wth Margaret Avison
An admirer of Avison and her poetry, Thibaudeau began work on her MA thesis on “Recent Canadian Poetry” later that fall. They became further acquainted when Northrop Frye took them out to lunch, and as he notes in his diary, “… I think Margaret & she really took to each other.” [See The Diaries of Northrop Frye 1942-1955, Volume 8, 1949 Mar. 28; this is the lunch Thibaudeau describes in the Biographical Sketch from 1979.]
See also the special issue of Canadian Poetry, Nos. 80-81 for the centenary of Margaret Avison’s birth, where Stan Dragland recalls Margaret and Colleen meeting again in 1973 and Margaret saying ‘I’m going Colleening!’… “Margaret caught [Colleen’s] dynamism in a single word. I’m very glad to have been on the spot to hear that word invented; otherwise, it might never have been spoken. And, speech being so evanescent, it might have been lost… Colleening: The Poetry and Letters of Colleen Thibaudeau is now the title of a play by Adam Corrigan Holowitz, with music by Stephen Holowitz and Oliver Whitehead.” (page 43)
For more about the working milieu of the library order desk from the time described in Thibaudeau’s poem, see Margaret Avison’s I Am Here and Not Not-There: An Autobiography(2009), pages 111-114.
“Notes on a Day” is from The Artemesia Book (1991), available from Brick Books.
Margaret Avison in 1973 — Family photo (I Am Here and Not Not-Here: An Autobiography, page 191)
Yes we are that too: we are everything who feel it. Everything that has meaning has the same meaning as angels: these hoverers and whirrers: occupied with us. Men may be in the parkgrass sleeping: or be he who sits in his shirtsleeves every blessed Sunday: rasping away at his child who is catching some sunshine: from the sticky cloud hanging over the Laura Secord factory: and teetering on the pales of the green iron fence: higher up than the briary bushes. I pass and make no sound: but the silver and whirr of my bicycle going round: but must see them who don’t see: get their fit, man and child: let this elastic moment stretch out in me: till that point where they are inside and invisible. It is not to afterward eat a candy: picket that factory: nor to go by again and see that rickety child on the fence. When the band of the moment breaks there will come angelic recurrence.
Colleen Thibaudeau, 1977
“This Elastic Moment” is included in Colleen Thibaudeau’s The Artemesia Book(1991), available from Brick Books.
Our grateful thanks to translator Patricia Godbout, who created this French version of Colleen Thibaudeau’s poem for Ellipse magazine in 1990.
Élastique, ce moment
Oui, nous sommes aussi cela : nous sommes tout ce qui est sensible. Tout ce qui possède un sens possède celui des anges : qui planent et qui vrombissent : veillent sur nous. Des hommes dorment-ils dans l’herbe du parc : un homme s’assoit-il en bras de chemise tous les dimanches : parle d’une voix grinçante à son enfant qui s’amuse au soleil : perçant le nuage collant au-dessus de l’usine Laura Secord : chancelant sur les pieux de la clôture de fer peinte en vert : bien plus haut que les buissons d’églantier. Je passe sans bruit : mais l’argent mais le vrombissement des roues de ma bicyclette : je dois voir qui ne me voit pas : prendre la mesure de l’homme et de l’enfant : laisser ce moment élastique s’étirer en moi : jusqu’à ce qu’ils soient intérieurs, invisibles. Nul besoin d’aller ensuite manger des friandises : ni de dresser des piquets devant l’usine : ou de repasser par là pour apercevoir l’enfant vaciller sur la clôture. Une fois brisé l’élastique du moment, viendra le retour angélique.
(Traduit par Patricia Godbout, (1990) Ellipse. (44) 99.)
Colleen Thibaudeau at the Writing in Our Time poetry conference in 1979, Vancouver, BC (Photo by Michael Lawlor)
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.
“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).
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 poetStéphane 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”.)
