Judith Copithorne


Judith Copithorne is a Canadian concrete and visual poet.

Life and career

Judith Copithorne grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, in an artistic family. Her childhood was filled with the artistic milieu of her parents and the books left by an artist uncle who died young, all of which gave her wide-ranging ideas about the possibilities of art and literature. Judith Copithorne started writing and drawing at an early age and, by the time she attended the University of British Columbia, had formed her own ideas about the arts. At UBC, she studied under such prominent figures 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 has made many contributions to concrete poetry and other types of experimental writing in prose, poetry and visual poetry, with works centering on domestic space and community. Her primary work involves the intersection of text and visual forms, with early work combining text with abstract line drawings, called Poem-drawings. Copithorne continued to explore various media and by 2015 was working almost entirely with computer generated compositions. In the Introduction to the anthology Four Parts Sand, she describes her work in the following manner:
Published in the first issues of blewointment and Ganglia, Copithorne went on to publish over 40 books, chapbooks and ephemeral items.

Selected Works