Eric Schmaltz: on Judith Copithorne (1939-2025)

 

 

 

 

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.

"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. 

"Another Order" by Judith Copithorne

"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.

Eric Schmaltz : Resonances and Affinities: A Poem’s Beginnings

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

 

 

“Influence is related to admiration. I would like to write like you. You are exploring what I would like to dare.”
-       Nicole Brossard

 

“What is miraculous to me is the way the reading makes my writing possible,” writes American poet Laynie Brown in an interview with rob mclennan, recently published in periodicities. In that interview, Brown offers insights into her practice and, in particular, her book-length responses to the works by poets with whom Brown feels an affinity. She describes, “a tremendous sense of gratitude, to be here in this time, with these particular poets” and explains that “my life as a poet is possible, in large part, because of these female poets.” The generative possibilities that come from reading poetry, from being in community with the language of one’s kith and kin is further emphasized by the recently published Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone, wherein Renee Gladman, Trish Salah, Hoa Nguyen, Nicole Brossard, and many others describe how reading empowers their practices. Like Brown and these poets, I, too, marvel at how reading makes writing possible. For me, reading is where a poem begins. Immersed in the language of other poets, reading offers my language a breath, a rhythm, a line, a horizon.

Lately, my reading has been project-focused with numerous books that have given life to my forthcoming collection, I Confess. This collection contributes to the confessional tradition while exploring the technics of confession: How do technologies and techniques of truth extraction –– polygraphy, trial by fire, truth serums, and more –– give shape to utterances that are true and false? For this book, I sought poetry that consciously and conscientiously cross into the social and political, explores a diversity of forms, and is grounded in research-based practices. Each poem finds it shape with the guidance of other poems that follow a path that I, too, seek to follow. Among the many that helped shape my thinking for my most recent work, I’ll share a few words on three collections with which I found resonance.

Philip Metres’ Sand Opera (2015) offers political poetry that brings together a diversity forms, traditional and innovative, to traverse found testimony from the “US invasions of Iraq, Abu Ghraib survivors, torturers, alongside personal lyric on fatherhood and Arab-American life” (Solmaz Sharif). Informed by the conceit of the opera, every page in Sand Opera is unalike. The poems are polyvocal, and he has employed techniques involving black outs, erasures, translucent pages, physical imagery, and performance. Metres’ subject isn’t lost amid the flurry of innovation; rather, its richer for them. Rife with formal approaches, Sand Opera asks me to carefully consider what a poem and poetic expression fundamentally is and can be.

Anatomic (2018) by Adam Dickinson offers a model for putting the personal into dialogue with the systemic –– ecological, medical, social, political, and more. At the centre of that collection Dickinson places his own body, subjecting it to a range of tests involving blood, urine, bacteria, and feces to measure his exposure and retainment of environmental contaminants. Using these scientific insights as both a structuring principle and springboard for his language, Dickinson tells the story of how his body came to be within our petroculture. Like Dickinson, I sought to place myself, a poet, under examination and explore the implications and insights that can be gained by embracing such vulnerability.

Like Dickinson, though less overtly scientific, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of (2018) is where I found deep resonance for her use of personal archives (photographs, memories, notes, etc.) as the foundation for her poetry. At the centre of Ghost Of is the disappearance of a brother by his own choice. Appearing throughout the collection are photographs wherein the brother has been removed, and the poems are built (literally and metaphorically) around those lacunae. For me, Nguyen’s book offers another model of an honest and vulnerable poetics that begins in the personal to offer relatable renderings of loss and longing.

Similarly to Brown, I feel “a tremendous sense of gratitude, to be here in this time, with these particular poets.” In “La Déferlante,” Nicole Brossard writes, “Influence is related to admiration. I would like to write like you. You are exploring what I would like to dare” (83). Brossard precisely articulates what I seek when I read. All of these writers have done something that I would like to dare to do, and I have turned to them to learn how to do it. I find consonance with their language and modes that, in turn, provide my language its own possibility. It is with other poets that a poem begins.

 

 

 

 

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.