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ll.l.27 -8.3.3l rant 2 cc blk.2
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ll.l.27 -8.6.l3 drsl 2l
dorsal dropped balance enter alone focus
to go in low ground behind back
spine basic erode fall hold on
collapse
state changes affect memory & modeling
lavender, myrh, sage, balsm pine, grapefruit,
olive leaf, chapparral, self heal, lemon balm
heart gone, key likewise
into cracks, behind
done down
ll.l.26 letters m-r

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l0.6.20 brack l0
engagement:
in agreement
the act of giving someone a |ob
the hostile meeting of opposing forces

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l0.6.20 brack l0
engagement:
in agreement
the act of giving someone a |ob
the hostile meeting of opposing forces
How Concrete and Intermedia Poetry Entered My Life: Mapping the Outlands

by Judith Copithorne
& Steve Calvert

bill bissett and I started working on concrete poetry here in Vancouver in 1961. I didn't know a lot
about the changing variety of art and literature that existed in the larger centers of the world. But
now as I start to think about it I realize that some news traveled quite fast. There was always a
magazine article somewhere or a book that a very enterprising book store owner or librarian had
secured. The difculties appeared to be more internal. That is the difculties appear to consist of
putting things together, making choices and believing what I seemed to be nding out about the
world and myself.

Entwining visual and typographic arts to preference poetic sensibilities rather than
functionalist design agendas, Visual Poetry, also known as Concrete, has a long and storied
history in Canada, and in Vancouver in particular. Synthesizing elements from typography,
science infographics, book design, comics, poetics, philosophy and humour, Visual Poetry
arrives at an intermediate form which resembles none of its noble parentage, but bears the
older signs of an ancient and evolving language, undergoing a permanent state of perpetual
reinvention.

In Vancouver, in 1965, a multidisciplinary group named The Sound Gallery was organized by and
around Al Neil, Gregg Simpson and Richard Anstey. Soon Helen Goodwin joined them and they
moved in 1966 to a bigger space which was named Motion Studio (1). I participated in many of the
activities there. A year later The Canada Council for the Arts funded a group which was to some
degree modeled after those two previous group but which became much bigger. This group named
itself Intermedia (2).

A sophisticated internationalist visual-literary tradition has developed around new
reproductive tools for expressing graphical potentials of an expanded approach to 'creative
writing'. Artists working with a poet's eye for refutation, have the opportunity to observe and
ally with underlying tendencies of our newly extended alphabets, and to take playful control of
the raw materials for this new transliterary culture. The era of 'Hypergraphics' predicted by
Lettrism, Situationism, and Marshall McLuhan since the 50s, is still only just beginning.

It is useful to remember that there do not appear to be very many really new ideas. Things go out of
fashion, are outlawed even. The technology obviously changes greatly but the ideas, feelings and
sensations in our lives and how we respond to them in all our myriad activities including those of
making literature and art are parts of a continuum which can be seen in the caves of such places as
Altamira up to the present.

Concrete aims to spotlight that presumed invisiblity of the type, to return 'reading' to that slow
multisensory engagement where the page folds in and out into a synaesthesic fugue of
suggestive echoes; visible, tactile, sonorous, palpable, visceral rhythms of visual suggestion.
Challenging any reading, Visual Poetry exerts a prismatic effect in the reecting attention of
the active reader. The calligraphy of conceptualism, philosophy's comic books, Concrete
remains a vital, celebrated, and expanding methodology for coaxing open fresh poetic
possibilities for graphical language, inviting a deeper participation and more conscious
investment in the wider context of literacy in an increasingly post-literate and glyph-oriented
civilization.

In 1960 when I met bill bissett at university we had heard of a multitude of things but didn't know if
most of them were actually true or workable. We thought and talked about many such ideas as that
of phonetic spelling and such books as The Second Sex, The Stranger, The Cherry Orchard and
many impressions and repressions internal and external. We wondered if Gertrude Stein's book, A
Long Gay Book, was really about being gay and if there was ever going to be a way to open the
world up for ourselves.

Judith Copithorne's concrete poetics are laden with a visceral synaesthesia, blending signs and
senses in a rich metatext of conated graphical systems: scientistic modellings and cyberpunk
cubism, sex and guts and fury, all legibly associating homophonies and morphologies, invoking
complexities well beyond the words of the world. Subtly communicating rewards always well
equal or greater than the attention directed to them. Flickering like a lm, the persistence of
vision produces spectral diffusions, breaking up identities from the high contrast blackon-
white letterforms, across a scattered page of text or hard lines of an abstract drawing. They
come alive with the reader's attention, who can only meet the writer's intentions by
approximations and emulation. We ll in the blanks, connect the dots, according to our capacity
for lateral association and suggestive referent the act of reading becomes what is real, in a
fabric of learned associations, not in any literal referent to words or not-words. An intensely
noisy system, any impression at all, is close enough.

I wondered but bill was more certain. He knew and went and did what had to be done while I
would wait until I was nally driven to things. I nally started to learn something about how to
meditate and how to do more with these combinations of language and drawing that I enjoyed doing
and how to keep writing and drawing. I also started to become a bit more involved in getting out
into the countryside and the energetics of food and herbs. Among other things I also became more
interested in dance and tried to imagine how various media could be combined which was useful to
me when I started working with others at Motion Studio.

All coded human expression is perceived and processed by the nervous system as identical to
and indistinguishable from language. The whole of nature and culture is language. If you can
perceive it, it is being simultaneously conceived and interpreted by a text - everything observed
is neutral information until alchemically transformed into valued categorical relevance by each
individual reader's rapt and activated literate attention. That gap of grasping marvel, the
threshold of comprehension, is the very extremely relevant avant-front of poetics: bow-wave of
history, moment of tension preceeding all knowledge with a disorienting rictus of marvelous
confusion. Tat vam sat. Any sufciently advanced technology will appear as magic.

I had started to try to read Gertrude Stein in the middle of my teens, in the 1950's . We had a very
good library in Regina, Saskatchewan where we lived in those days. There were no book stores but
there was an excellent library. So I tried to read Stein but then the librarians would say to me Do
you understand what that is about? And I would have to say no. But I was very curious. I also
wondered why one always had to stay on the lines when one was writing. bill was often curious
about many of the same things that I wanted to know about. One of the things we were curious
about was the nature of language and we came up with the idea that the straight lines in writing
were really just another convention that was very useful but had got out of hand as conventions
often do.
How many languages can you read? Hebrew? Kanji? Farsi? Can you read music? Infographics?
How about cartoons? Flirtations? Have you listened to Russian poetry? Gaelic? Arabic? Can
you recognize these things as poetry, appreciate an expansive sensibility of poesie, even though
you don't rigorously comprehend what it is being said at all times? Do you feel like you know
beyond knowing that something marvelous is happening? Yes. Just when you're not
comfortable with language, is exactly when it elevates into Poetry. There's so much speculative
knowledge between the signs, so much deep nuance and suggestive spin in the notes that aren't
played, so much inection and timing and synchronicity.

We had never heard of Concrete Poetry but we started trying to see what would happen if we let the
writing move off the lines. Then, in 1963, bill began to publish a magazine named blew ointment
press. He published the work of many writers and artists in his magazine including some of his and
my rst attempts at concrete poetry. Right after that he got a letter from bp nichol and through bp
we discovered that there was something called concrete poetry. This was tremendously exciting as it
is sure to be when you discover that other people have seen or thought similar things to you and
you realize that you have found fascinating, new intellectual companions in this world.

Judith Copithorne
& Steve Calvert

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1. Anyone wanting more information on the Motion Studio, the Sound Gallery or
Intermedia should look at Gregg Simpson's web blog:
<www.thesoundgalleryintermedia.blogspot.com/2010/12.soundgallery.htm.> Also there
is a variety of information at the
web site named ruins in process <vancouverartinthesixties.com>. And there is more
information regarding intermedia at
<www.michaeldecourcy.com/intermedia/blog.htm.>

2. Dick Higgins is credited by Wikipedia as being the person who coined the term Intermedia in
1966.