When I first
encountered the visual texts of the spirited “intermedia worker” Judith
Copithorne, my understanding of what poetry and art could be was once again thrown
wide open. It was in the pages of a 2010 issue of Rampike (Vol.
19, No. 1) that I first encountered Judith’s “Fleur.” A veritable bouquet of
letters and lines extending in every direction, “Fleur” differed from what I
had previously known of concrete poetry, which was then mainly the clean-lined
minimalism of the 1950s and the typewritten excess of bill bissett. One year later,
I was invited to co-curate a gallery exhibition of concrete poetry and text art
for the Niagara Artists Centre, with Copithorne’s poem at the top of my
inclusions list. This also marked the beginning of my long-distance friendship
with Judith, which developed over the years as my dedication to what she calls
“surprising writing” deepened. Since then, I have regularly returned to
Judith’s work, which culminated in the publication of Another Order: Selected Works and
brings poetry, prose, and visuals from across Judith’s 60 years of devoted
artmaking. Her work has been a beacon for those interested in the interstitial,
the bodily, the intimate, the explosive, and the strange.
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| "Fleur" by Judith Copithorne |
In the years leading
up to the publication of Another Order, Judith and I regularly spoke on
the phone. I will always be grateful for those long hours of light-hearted and
serious conversation, roaming from anecdotes of her childhood and artmaking to
her sharp critiques of certain established scholars and poets. On one occasion,
I asked her how she would describe herself, and she used the descriptor
“intermedia worker,” an apt phrase given her penchant for artistic expression
in the liminal expanse between discrete media.
Born in Vancouver in 1939, Judith first self-published Returning in 1965, a collection of lyrical poetry that foregrounds her life-long thematic preoccupation with love, vision, sensation, and cycles. From there, she became a true force in Vancouver’s scene with contributions to concrete poetry and other intermedia contexts from the 1960s through to the present. She was published in the first issues of blewointment and Ganglia and continued to publish her work with small or private presses since then. Her work has been anthologized in New Direction in Canadian Poetry (1971), The Cosmic Chef (1970), Four Parts Sand (1972), THE LAST BLEWOINTMENT ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 1 (1985), The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry, 1998–2008 (2012), and Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (2021), among other places. Her work was also featured nationally and internationally in gallery exhibitions and shows. Despite this success, Judith’s work occupies a fringe space in writing, not always valued by wider the general public. She once recalled for me a time in the 1960s when she sold a print of her concrete poetry to a boy at a market who later returned with his mother demanding his money back. Presumably, the boy’s mother was offended by Judith’s far-out aesthetic that embodied certain hallmarks of the counter-culture movement or the way it balanced on the border between legibility and obscurity.
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| "Another Order" by Judith Copithorne |
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| "Phases" by Judith Copithorne |
Despite this, her life-long practice was spurred by a genuine curiosity that drove her to explore a multitude of media and techniques, ranging from illustration, sketching, calligraphy, typewriting, graphic design, and more. Like any artist, her work transformed over the years, moving from the monochromatic and hand-drawn to vividly colourful later works, indicating that her own sensibilities were ripening and widening in dialogue with a world in flux.
The title “intermedia
worker” also engenders Copithorne’s role within Vancouver’s artistic communities.
In the 60s and 70s, she was involved with the numerous of the city’s
alternative art venues, including Sound Gallery, Motion Studio, and Intermedia,
where she did everything from dancing with Helen Goodwin’s TheCo group to
filling holes and sanding floors. As her friends and colleagues have told me,
she frequently attended local events for many years after. It was a true honour
to witness Judith at her final public reading in Vancouver just last spring,
where she read at Pyatt Hall to a packed room of family, friends, and admirers
from across generations, including Renee Rodin, Fred Wah, Stephen Collis, Dina
Del Bucchia, and Daniel Zomparelli, with her characteristic cheekiness and
professionalism. Judith dedicated much of her life to the proliferation of
artistic practices and supporting the work of others, especially women, in her
community. It was heartening to see Judith’s commitment and dedication
reflected back at her on that night.
The evidence of Judith’s influence is enormous, perhaps most substantially verified by the publication of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry, edited by poet Amanda Earl, which gathers work by women and non-binary poets and artists in the expanded field of intermedial poetics across the world. As Earl writes in her own reflection on Judith, she saw her “as a role model when I was told that few women made visual poetry.” Earl isn’t alone in recognizing the importance of Judith and her work. The Toronto launch for Another Order saw multiple generations of experimental poets gather, including Stephen Cain, Amanda Earl, Kate Siklosi, Jessica Bebenek, and Rasiqra Revulva paying homage to Judith and her legacy. Less anecdotally, however, critics have recently underscored the importance of Judith and her work. In her review of Another Order, Cathy Ford identifies Judith as “an artist of radical commitment, tempered by hard-won, revelatory thoughts, and uniquely visualized challenges.” Likewise, Trevor Carolan writes that Judith’s “probing crossmedia experiments with visual and concrete poetry broadened the limits of what Canadian literary adventuring could be, and in doing so, helped budge Vancouver from its once gender-biased, colonial identity.” Judith’s presence will always be with us; she had a part in shaping literature and writing in Canada as we know it.
I’ve always read Judith’s stunning staple-bound chapbook Rain as a poem about unrequited love. Published by Ganglia in 1969, Judith employs highly stylized strokes of what appear to be brush and pen. The poem begins with heartbreak and ends with a narrator who learns how to find pleasure within. “A shore / at last / reached,” says the narrator at the chapbook’s end. In another way, Rain is about one person’s emergence from confusion, suffering, and distress; it is a story about finding the way to light and clarity. We’re very fortunate to have shared this time on earth with Judith, to have witnessed her art and life that so illuminates for us a way of being and making that is honest and expansive, that opens for us “a home beyond / the dark / night sea / of rain.”
image credit: Judith Copithorne, photo by Ron Jansenn
Eric Schmaltz is the author of Borderblur
Poetics: Intermedia and Avant-gardism in Canada, 1963-1988 (University of
Calgary Press), Surfaces (Invisible Publishing), and the forthcoming I
Confess (Coach House Books). He is the editor of Another Order: Selected Works of Judith Copithorne (Talonbooks) and co-editor of I Want to Tell
You Love by bill bissett and Milton Acorn. His creative work has been
published, exhibited, and performed nationally and internationally. He lives in
Kjipuktuk/Halifax.
