When I first encountered the work of Vancouver concrete poet Judith
Copithorne, it was through the second-hand book trade, via Winnipeg’s Red River
Books. Thumbing through numerous ephemeral small press publications such as Jim
Brown’s west coast seen (Talonbooks, 1969), John
Robert Colombo’s New Directions in Canadian Poetry (Holt,
Rinehart and Winston of Canada, 1971) and bill bissett’s THE LAST
BLEWOINTMENT ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 1 (Nightwood Editions, 1985), I was struck
by Copithorne’s hand-drawn swirls of text and obvious refusal to adhere to the
standard of equally-spaced vertical lines of typed lyric. She might have concurrently
been writing poems set in a more straightforward manner, but what stood out was
her engagement beyond the words, opening the possibilities of meaning through
approaching text on a physical level. Copithorne, as she informed through her
1971 title Runes, was the author of “hand drawn poem-drawings.”
Through more than five decades of what appears to be a rather steady production,
her poems have involved sketches and overlays, swirls, curves and flourishes
that allow the spatial arrangement of her sketch-poems to inform, and even
twist, how they are read.
Part of what appeals in Copithorne’s work is in the engagement with not
only the physical aspects of text, and even text-as-image, but one grounded in
daily activity and community. In a short essay Calgary poet Derek Beaulieu
wrote for Lemonhound, he included this short
description of Judith Copithorne:
Her exemplary work from the 1960s and 1970s integrates
a daily diaristic practice (especially in Arrangements)
that documents a domestic space centered on meditation and community. 1969’s Release consists of a series of wisp-like ethereal
hand-drawn texts that move through gestural fragments and slights of
handwriting accumulated into florid yogic texts that move between mandala and
map. The suggestion that her pieces are drawn and not written and are hyphenated poem-drawings
speaks to a textual hybridity which places looking on the same plane as
reading. With Arrangements, Runes and Release
Copithorne creates a visual poetry of looking and reading the domestic and the
community.
Born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1939, by the early 1960s Judith
Copithorne existed in association with an informal grouping of “Downtown
Vancouver Poets,” a group imagined as a linked counterpoint to those involved
at TISH through the University of British Columbia.
Along with Copithorne, this loose mélange of Vancouver writers included Gladys
(Maria) Hindmarch, John Newlove, bill bissett, Gerry Gilbert, Maxine Gadd and
Roy Kiyooka. Later on, she was part of “the heyday of experimental writing and
publishing that was centred in Kitsilano in the early 1970s.” As with bissett,
her production began to evolve into concrete poems produced as paintings, and
has since evolved into experimenting with computer-generated shifts of image
and text, adapting to new technology as it appears, to continue producing
challenging work. Having appeared in the first issues of blew
ointment and Ganglia, a more
recent author biography online at Ditch includes
the assertion that “Judith is constantly changing the mediums she works in as
they become available, but the core there is always her distinctive touch.”
She has published “multiple volumes of text images and poetry” and even
the occasional volume of prose, and a list of her titles includes Returning (Returning Press, 1965), Release:
Poem-Drawings (Bau-Xi Gallery, 1969), Rain (Ganglia
Press, 1969), Runes (Coach House/Intermedia,
1971), Miss Tree’s Pillow Book (Intermedia /
Returning Press, 1971), Until Now
(Heshe&ItWorks, 1971), Heart’s Tide
(Vancouver Community Press, Writing Series #8, 1972), Arrangements
(Intermedia Press, 1973), A Light Character
(Coach House Press, 1985), Third Day of Fast (Silver
Birch Press, 1987), Horizon (Pangan
Subway Ritual, 1992), Tern:
(Returning Press, 2000), Brackets & Boundaries
(Returning Press, 2012) and see lex ions
(Xexoxial Editions, 2015). Ottawa poet, publisher and critic jwcurry released a
bibliography of her work as part of an issue of news notes,
produced as issue #400 of his 1cent series (2009).
Given her more than fifty years of producing and publishing, it’s no
wonder that jwcurry has referred to Copithorne as “our first lady of concrete.”
Despite this, most critical attention on concrete and visual forms in Canada have
predominantly focused on her male counterparts, from bpNichol to David UU to
bissett himself. Nichol once described her as “[o]ne of the few clear
successors to the tradition William Blake founded,” an assertion John Robert
Colombo repeated in his brief introduction to her work in his New Directions in Canadian Poetry. To introduce her quarter
(joining Earle Birney, bill bissett and Andrew Suknaski) of the anthology Four Parts Sand (Oberon Press, 1972), she wrote this:
Poem-drawings are an attempt to fuse visual and verbal
perceptions. The eye sees, the ear hears, movement is felt kinaesthetically
throughout the body and all these sensations are perceived in heart, belly and
brain. The aims are the same as in other forms of literature and art:
concentration and communication, delight, immersion in the present moment.
Before discovering Copithorne’s work, I had never seen this kind of
poetry outside of my rather dry university literature courses, having read
through visual pieces by American poet E.E. Cummings (1894-1962) and French
poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). Thanks to my own lack of knowledge and,
arguably, curiosity to self-research, it had never occurred that such
explorations of text around and across the page were anything more than antiquated
historical blips. While not wishing to overstate, it was through discovering
Copithorne that, in my eyes, the page became possible. Beyond being a mere
placeholder for text, the unmarked page exploded into a larger, expanded
canvas. From Copithorne, my twentysomething reading trajectories rippled
outward, discovering the work of poets such as bpNichol, David UU, Andrew
Suknaski, Bob Cobbing, jwcurry, Hart Broudy, Beth Jankola, Paul Dutton, Steve
McCaffery, da levy, Daniel f. Bradley, Lawrence Upton and Gary Barwin, as well
as bissett himself. But through whatever accident of reading, my first
contemporary introduction to visual and concrete poems was Judith Copithorne. I
am grateful for that.
Ian Whistle has published in filling Station,
CRASH: a litzine, Moss Trill
and Nöd. Small poetry publications have appeared
via jwcurry’s 1cent and Ken Hunt’s Spacecraft. His chapbook, Inaccuracies, was just released by above/ground press. He
currently runs h&, an occasional journal of
visual/concrete poetry and assorted other oddities: http://handandpoetry.blogspot.ca/
Photo credit: Russell Kildal
