Colleen Thibaudeau

The Blue of the Swimming Pool

The blue of the Swimming Pool isn’t a real blue
And there is no easy way to describe it as water;
It transforms an ordinary backyard and the ordinary people
Who roar up in trucks, sitting stunned for a moment
Now that there is no longer the moving belt bearing them on;
Getting unbelieving out of the tucks, setting up playpens,
Getting undressed and into bathing suits and finally entering
The Pool.

The Cat sits (while no one is looking) on the portulaca
In the rock garden and looks at the people in the unbelievable
Not real blue of the Swimming Pool. There are the very young
Grandparents, their own married young and the spouses
And the assorted babies of the married young. Muscular,
Shining, joyous, the babies unafraid, they all accept the water
Moment: fountain of life or very womb.

And the Cat looks on
In the sharp sunlight and drinks in at the eye the not real blue
Of the Swimming Pool and the swimmers transformed and moving
Freely, ordinary and beautiful.

Colleen Thibaudeau, 1984

“The Blue of the Swimming Pool” is from The Martha Landscapes (1984) and available from Brick Books.

( ( ( 0 ) ) ) Listen to Colleen Thibaudeau read the poem here.
(Souwesto Words, 1999. Courtesy Ergo Productions)

Janet’s Postcard From Brazil

Janet’s postcard from Brazil goes
hand to hand as the sender intended, intending
no ending in sending to those

well-wishers and stay-at-homes;
well-wishing, time-spending,
with message unending comes

all heron feather halo’d, eyes that thrill
in the charcoal-dusted face, sending
unending: the postcard from Brazil.

Colleen Thibaudeau, 1984

“Janet’s Postcard From Brazil” is from The Martha Landscapes (1984) and available from Brick Books.

Prof. Don Hair (1937-2023), a fan of the poem, recalls that “Janet’s postcard came with the request that it be passed around to friends.” (Donald S. Hair, A Professor’s Life, p. 484)

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.

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.”

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”.)