Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

have a beer or another cup of tea. By such means, we managed to plan and design and make
camera-ready a book of just over 40 poets, just under 160 pages, without noticing too much and
without spending too much money.
The real problem was enabling the poets to say what they had to say in so few pages. As I have
indicated, Cobbing and I were used to collaborating with each other and with others; but we had
never done anything like this before, and we each had a different history of working in the specific
areas covered by the anthology.
Cobbing had co-edited the earlier verbivisivoco, Writers Forum’s 500th publication; but the source
material for that remarkable book was the other 499 Writers Forum publications. Verbivisivoco
showcases aspects of the work that Writers Forum had already published. Word Score Utterance
Choreography was entirely different and it was new territory for both of us.
I had thought that our aesthetic differences might be a problem, but in fact they seem to have
been productive! There is an energy to the finished product, for which we can take no individual
credit, which would not have been there if one of us had put the book together on their own.
Throughout, there was the need to co-operate with each other and reconcile, in this context,
aesthetic differences amicably and easily without compromising them. That isn’t necessarily easy
and I am not sure quite how we did it, but we did.
There was no way that we could include all the poets who might be included so we had to be
selective and that meant that we had to discuss exactly what the inclusion of each and every poet
would bring to the whole.
There were a few whom I knew through contacts on the Internet, a facility Cobbing does not have;
and he has contacts and information going back decades before I was thinking on these matters.
Initially, we each drew up a list of proposed contributors. Although we shared a few names, the
lists were fairly different in their priorities so that, although neither of us started with anything
like enough definite names, we had nearly enough by the end of the first editorial meeting; but the
list did change as we worked.
There were several conflicts of opinion and, in retrospect, I find them to have been only useful.
One had to give reasons for inclusion and exclusion, reasons good enough to persuade the other. In
trying to give them one began to see the other side.
Because space was so tight, we needed a guiding structure and that was to have a linear poem,
that is a conventionally-presented poem, a visual poem and a statement, linking, comparing and
commenting upon the poems as exemplary. To help with the statement, we provided a series of
questions that could be answered directly, indirectly or thrown away:
• Are your visual texts intended for performance or for the page alone?
• If used for performance, to what extent are your visual texts strict notation and to what extent
are they starting points?
• Do you make/perform non-alphabetic signs?