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Judith Copithorne
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Canadian artist and poet
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| Born | 1939 |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Education | University of British Columbia |
| Known for | Concrete poetry |
Judith Copithorne (born 1939) is a Canadian concrete and visual poet.
Judith Copithorne grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, in an artistic family. She started writing and drawing at an early age and, by the time she attended the University of British Columbia, had already established a unique artistic style. At UBC, she studied under such prominent figures as Warren Tallman and George Woodcock.[citation needed]
In the early 1960s she became acquainted with an informal group of "Downtown Poets," including writers such as Gladys (Maria) Hindmarch, John Newlove, bill bissett, Gerry Gilbert, Maxine Gadd and Roy Kiyooka, centered around the Vancouver venues of Sound Gallery, Motion Studio and Intermedia Press.[citation needed] The Downtown Poets were involved in more radical experimentation than the established TISH group of the University of British Columbia, represented by poets such as George Bowering, Fred Wah, Frank Davey and Daphne Marlatt.[1] The appellation "Downtown poets" was invented by UBC professor Warren Tallman to distinguish the San Francisco Renaissance-influenced UBC writers from the homegrown Canadian poets.
Judith Copithorne works with concrete poetry and other types of experimental writing in prose, poetry and visual poetry. Her core themes include domestic space and community.[2] Copithorne writes between text and visual forms, with early work combining text with abstract line drawings, called Poem-drawings. In the Introduction to the anthology Four Parts Sand,[3] she describes her work in the following manner:
"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."
Copithorne has published over 40 books, chapbooks, and ephemeral items; a bibliography of her work was published by jwcurry in the March, 2009 issue #400 of 1 cent).[4] She has been published in blewointment and Ganglia. Her work has been featured in numerous gallery exhibitions and is widely influential for multiple generations of poets living and working today.[5]
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.
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