Judith Copithorne


Judith Copithorne was a Canadian concrete and visual poet.

Life and career

Judith Copithorne was born in Vancouver, British Columbia on August 5, 1939, where she grew up in an artistic family. She started writing and drawing at an early age and by the time she attended University of British Columbia, she had already established a unique artistic style. At UBC, she studied under prominent figures such as Warren Tallman and George Woodcock.
In the early 1960s, she became acquainted with an informal group of "Downtown Poets," including writers such as Gladys 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. 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. 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 worked with concrete poetry and other types of experimental writing in prose, poetry and visual poetry. Her core themes include domestic space and community. Copithorne wrote 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, she described her work in the following manner:
Copithorne 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. She has been published in blewointment and Ganglia. Her work was featured in numerous gallery exhibitions and is widely influential for multiple generations of poets living and working today.
Copithorne died on May 15, 2025, at the age of 85.

Selected works

  • Returning
  • Meandering
  • Release: Poem-Drawings
  • Rain
  • Runes
  • Miss Tree's Pillow Book
  • Until Now
  • Heart's Tide
  • History's Wife: a sculpture
  • Arrangements
  • Albion's Rose Blooms to Calypso Beat
  • A Light Character
  • Third Day of Fast
  • Horizon
  • Carbon Dioxide
  • For my ancestors
  • Tern:
  • Brackets & Boundaries
  • see lex ions
  • Phases / Phrases
  • ''Another Order: Selected Works''

Anthologies

  • Spanish Fleye, David W.Harris, ed.
  • West Coast Seen, Jim Philips Brown, ed.
  • The Cosmic Chef, bpNichol, ed.
  • I Am A Sensation, Gerry Goldberg & George Wright, eds.
  • New Directions in Canadian Poetry, John Robert Colombo, ed.
  • Four Parts Sand, Michael Macklem, ed.
  • Earle Birney, Bruce Nesbitt, ed.
  • a book of process, Eldon Garnet, ed.
  • W)here?: The Other Canadian Poetry, Eldon Garnet, ed.
  • concrete poetry?, editor unknown
  • The Oxford Book of Canadian Literature in English, Margaret Atwood, ed.
  • The Last Blewointment Anthology, Volume I, Bill Bissett, ed.
  • Vancouver Poetry, Allan Safarik, ed.
  • Paging Peggy Lefler, jwcurry, ed.
  • wit out, Billy Little, ed.
  • radiant danse uv being: a potic portrait of bill bissett, Jeff Pew & Steven Roxborough, eds.
  • Holy Beep!, Natalie Zina Walschots, ed.
  • Postmodern Decadence, Gregory Betts, ed.
  • The Art of Typewriting, Marvin Sackner & Ruth Sackner, eds.
  • Schreib/ Maschinen/ Kunst, Marvin Sackner & Ruth Sackner, eds.
  • concrete is porous, Bill Bissett & Hart Broudy, eds.
  • Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry: a 21st Century Anthology, Amanda Earl, ed.
  • After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses 1960-2025, Steve Clay & M.C.Kinniburgh, eds.
  • LMNTS: fractionating 6 decades of canadian extralinearature, Daniel Bradley, Hart Broudy, jcurry & Marshall Hryciuk, eds.