Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

It took Cobbing 10 years—or 20 years, depending how you date the origin of Writers Forum, to
reach his 100th publication and that was called simply ‘WF100’. The 200th, Concerning Concrete
Poetry, came in September 1978, 5 years later. Number 500 in 1992 was the anthology
VerbiVisiVoco. Writers Forum publications are now numbered in the 900s.
As well as filling the need for such an anthology, Word Score Utterance Choreography also
celebrates the ongoing achievement of Writers Forum. It is, and was planned as, Writers Forum’s
750th publication.
The Writers Forum range is enormous; and its choice of authors is often very perceptive. Although
Cobbing is nearly 80, when one might expect him to slow up, he is still trying new ideas, honing his
own skills and encouraging new and not so new poets by offering to publish them. A few nights
ago, I was looking at Bill Griffiths’ new Writers Forum book, to be published on Saturday, and Bill
remarked how well-designed and well-produced it is by any reasonable standard.
I have already described my ignominious involvement in the fund-raising, so I shan’t go back over
that. We got the money; but we didn’t get enough and we had to deal with that. For a start, of
course, we took no fee for our work and offered none to the poets published. And we soon
abandoned our plans to allow examples of the notational use of colour.
We had to limit the number of pages, quite severely, to an artificial 3 per poet. Really that is
ridiculous given the scale and complexity of the subject; and in solving the cost problem we created
an editorial problem.
Writers Forum has its own fairly large photocopier and I have a decent enough home computer.
Bob is an expert with his photocopier, reproducing what cannot, according to the manufacturers
of the copier, be reproduced, and I am fairly adept with the computer.
We both keep an eye out for cheap and co-operative printers and from the beginning we planned
to present the chosen printer with camera ready artwork produced on my laser and/or Bob’s
photocopier. We asked the poets for camera-ready artwork wherever possible: this made our lives
easier and also went a long way to solving the homogenising tendency of any collection of
disparate material. Knowing the page size, the poets were able—if they wished—to redesign their
pages accordingly. As a result, we have managed to maintain both continuity and individual
difference through our design.
The title page came about quite easily.
I prepared some sheets to illustrate how one could use the features of the word-processor I use to
make interesting title pages; and how with a bit of trouble one could make the words seem to
dance. I intended my work to be taken as an example for discussion; but Bob said he thought what
I had done was fine and so it stuck.
We met about once a month, except towards the end when we seemed to meet every other day,
and tried to make the work fun. We have any number of projects on the go so there is always
plenty to talk about. We would start with a cup of tea or coffee and cheer ourselves up with a bit of
gossip, then we’d concentrate extremely hard on the book for three or four hours. After that, we’d