Recently, I had come across a Canadian poet and artist: Judith Copithorne. She didn’t just write and make art separately. She combined the two with tremendous success.
As a lifetime resident of Vancouver, she had access to a growing community of poets during the 60s that took their lead from the California renaissance poets such as Gary Snyder. I’ve taken great delight in reading his work for several years.
After graduating from the University of British Columbia, she became involved with the Downtown Poets. Amongst them was a poet that was an early influence on my own poems, Bill Bissett. As a minor digression, I was reading at a local open mic several years ago, when walking to the stage, there he was. How the hell was I going to read my crap in front of a poet whom I’ve studied and admired?
During Judith’s time with the Downtown Poets, her and the others rejected a local poetry movement and magazine called Tish (an anagram for you know what.) It was too formal for them. They began exploring visual poetry. Judith spent the rest of her long career immersing herself in the possibilities presented to her with variations of the form.
She had passed away at 85 a few weeks ago. Her work has been published in several anthologies and magazines and she had published 40 books, mostly self-published chapbooks. Prolific artists have always been a fascination for me.
She had once said about her work;
“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.”
Her work, or at least the thinking behind it reminds me of the early surrealists, such as André Breton. Being without fear of accepted convention. Her work warrants further investigation.
Untitled, Unknown owner