Carson
Tipper was born in 1957 in Edmonton Alberta, raised in theYukon and is
12th generation Canadian. He moved to Vancouver, BC at the age
of 11 and is now living in Richmond. Husband and father of three children ages
16 to 21, Carson has been a self employed contractor for the last twenty years.
He has read his poetry in Vancouver over the past 3 to 4 years and has been
writing for over thirty years. In 1976 he attended The University of British
Columbia favouring subjects such as creative writing, linguistics and Greek.
Carson attended Langara College Arts Program in 1978 to study design, Greek
mythology and various arts. In 1980 he attended The Emily Carr College of
Art and graduated with honours in sculpture and ceramics in 1984. He has since
taught sculpture at UBC continuing education programs and has continued drawing
and sculpting privately with most all of his work focused on the human figure.
Carson’s’ personal statement about the visual arts and poetry is this:
“my poetic works to date speak to the passion of living, to the need we all have
to be connected to one another, and to the celebration of the journey we all
walk”. My poetic voice has always come from a deep place in my heart, from
emotions that I’ve always have been able to articulate without fear and with
truth. As a child I was taught to “Listen to your heart, and to be true to
yourself.” The difficulty as a artist and writer is tuning out the other voices
so the self you are expressing can be heard, not silencing any of them, but
conducting it towards a particular product of expression. The conversation with
self is the process of the working and creating.
Contact:
carsontipper@hotmail.com
Selected Poem:
The Grass May Be Greener
let us know no better - like cattle
let us be blind to our barb wired corral
let us walk up to obstacles and scratch
our backs against fates’ sharpest points
lets us bump the posts of our containment
with broad shoulders until the earth moves
and the weight of our persistence gives
way
to a new slant that an itch in life
provides
let the barb wire comb our matted mane
let it mark the side where grass is
greener
let the path along it, where we travel
define boundaries but not limit the
possibility
that doors can open and gates will swing
in our life
that truth is not less of this but more of
this
that life often gives us more then we can
endure
but we’ll always have pastures that lay
beyond to graze
and that the barb, not to be avoided, will
lead us there
