Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

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• Do you use machines/technology in the preparation of your work? Why?/Why not? And so on. The entire questionnaire is reproduced in the book. We did not want the book to mystify anything, certainly not the editorial process. The letter of invitation is included also and you will see that we hinted that 3 pages might be exceeded if there was good reason. Generally, poets co-operated with the limit, understanding the problem. Some ignored it initially but none whom we cut back to 3 pages seem to have resented it. During the final days of our work, we decided to reduce the resource pages at the end of the book in order to allow some poets a wider spread and I am still happy with that decision. A few missed the point entirely and that necessitated an exchange of correspondence. We shared such work, such as it was, usually basing the division of labour upon who knew whom best. In some cases, we had to arrange, as politely as possible, for second language English to be rewritten. The book changed a little conceptually as we went along, but only a little. There is a wide range of ages and we had to wait for illnesses to be recovered from to include a few of the more aged; that led to delay in publishing; but we felt it was appropriate to do so. That is one of the freedoms of publishing a book from your kitchen table. Although, of necessity, we set the page size from the beginning, other design matters were left to the later stages of the process. When all the work was in, we mocked up the book and made final allocations of pages. In addition to the three plus pages per poet, there was an introduction by Robert Sheppard, another by me and a preface. The hardest work was in the thinking, both in planning the book’s potential contents and in designing the final look of the thing. I think that the title page and cover design were second only in the time they took to develop to the time it took to prepare the text of the invitation and guiding questions. Bob’s wife, the artist Jennifer Pike, spent ages with colour swatches getting the whole thing just right; and the printer obliged by changing the tone of the colours slightly without asking, just enough so that instead of being just right it looks, to me, a bit odd. But I am pleased to say that everyone else seems to think it looks fine. While all of that was going on, we were playing with titles. So many titles... I am happy with what we have, though it is a bit of a mouthful. It isn’t just me who thinks that—I’ve noticed how many people refer to it as “your anthology of visual poetry” Writers Forum doesn’t have a promotional budget. It doesn’t have sales reps. We launched Word Score Utterance Choreography at the Artists Book Fair and sold some. We launched it again at Sub Voicive Poetry and sold a few more; and again at Bob’s workshop. Two days ago I had an email from a colleague in the USA who is hoping to promote it in ways as yet unclear to me. We had hoped to see it in college libraries throughout the world and, indeed, one or two have bought it. It has been used as a teaching tool at a number of institutions and we have had some
truly enthusiastic responses Charles Bernstein emailed me: ‘This book is terrific! A delight to have and perform with. Also very much along with lines of what we were advocating with Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word’; and an editor who was then putting together an anthology of visual poetry wrote me that he had decided to rethink his entire approach having read Word Score Utterance Choreography. I don’t think I could ask for more than that. Word Score Utterance Choreography was an attempt to educate and inform. As a tool for doing so, I think it succeeds. The problem is distribution, not just of our book but of the mass of material to which it refers. When it came from the printers, I tried to look at it objectively and was surprised perhaps shocked to see how few women there are in it. Somehow, that was never addressed at the planning stage; and it does seem to be a bit of a boys’ area at present. That is something I would like to look into. I think it is an objective fact, or was. Since then I have discovered a number of poets I would have liked to have known about before, in time to consider for the anthology, and they are all women. The decision to publish the work in alphabetical order of the artists’ names was for practical reasons of being able to find the poets because it is an unofficial house rule of Writers Forum that page numbers are to be avoided. It has also, inadvertently, produced some exciting juxtapositions. I wish we could have a book that could auto-shuffle its pages. In our selection of poets we deliberately crossed schools, countries, ideologies and ages, and I am happy with that. I wanted the book to show the possibilities of an area of artistic activity and not to promote one school over another. Having said that, I am sure that the editing shows prejudice and ignorance. I am not happy about that. One works against it; but I can live with the certainty of failure or incomplete success. We considered adding suggestions as to how the material we have anthologised might be used for teaching; we considered it at some length and decided finally to let the materials speak for themselves to the readers, who could then use them as they wished. We both learned a great deal. It was extremely interesting to find how strongly I felt for or against particular works, and valuable to try to make the case for them. I had been so busy making poetry prior to this project I had spent relatively little time thinking about my own work and the work of others; so it was good for my brain. The range of approaches which I took part in clarifying has also led me to question almost all of my positions over again. I presented some of my latest thought on the subject at a Kings Talk in London a few weeks back, and I hope that I shall have a booklet ready to publish by the end of the year. Writers Forum has already taken it although much of it is still in my head [4]. Bob Cobbing and Writers Forum too are looking towards the future. The 1000th Writers Forum publication has been announced as appearing in the year 2000. It will, funds permitting, be another anthology, co-edited by Bob and myself, an international anthology, and it will build on this book, Word Score Utterance Choreography, but widening the scope considerably. [5]
Page 2 and 3: Commentaries on Bo
Page 4 and 5: Contents Acknowledgements 6 Introdu
Page 6 and 7: Acknowledgements An earlier and sho
Page 8 and 9: That first essay, from over 30 year
Page 10 and 11: Review of Pattern of Performance (A
Page 12 and 13: Bob Cobbing at The Voice Box Cobbin
Page 14 and 15: Bob Cobbing at The Klinker (29th Ap
Page 16 and 17: Co-editing Word Score Utterance Cho
Page 18 and 19: It took Cobbing 10 years—or 20 ye
Page 22 and 23: I would like to see the visual inte
Page 24 and 25: Introduction of Bob Cobbing at the
Page 26 and 27: tonight at Bob’s instigation, a f
Page 28 and 29: I shall quote now from a slightly-c
Page 30 and 31: espect. The contents are linear poe
Page 32 and 33: the level of the book rather than a
Page 34 and 35: medium may leave us more flexibilit
Page 36 and 37: Introduction to Bob Cobbing at Sub
Page 38 and 39: Ladies and Gentlemen, Bob Cobbing.
Page 40 and 41: silent. Then he turned intense atte
Page 42 and 43: Bob Cobbing: A Worker in Progress I
Page 44 and 45: It was during that time that I met
Page 46 and 47: Funeral Oration for Cobbing (11th O
Page 48 and 49: Celebrating the Memory of Bob Cobbi
Page 50 and 51: Bob Cobbing: A Talk Given at Boat T
Page 52 and 53: As well as the simplicity of approa
Page 54 and 55: The Destruction in Art volume recen
Page 56 and 57: themselves and not a completion in
Page 58 and 59: Reissue of Kroklok Kroklok was an e
Page 60 and 61: Republication of Bob Cobbing’s Li
Page 62 and 63: and the foreground of the image; an
Page 64 and 65: has been more difference in aesthet
Page 66 and 67: It might be that he changed his min
Page 68 and 69: So far, within a page, Cobbing has
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Review of With Our Tongue Our Drils
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criteria before being sure of them;
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Collaborations for Peter Finch Lawr
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The working order of pages changed
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Introduction to Bob Cobbing and Wri
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The supposed improvement in product
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inevitable. I am not sure it was so
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ut eye elements! A notional alien n
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However, there is functional writin
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There are those poets who inherit t
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I have included less on the 1980s
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word or any inflection of it; nor d
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making poetry than he had been. And
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he did formally, in a context of th
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And now as poetry more and more bec
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Another Story of Bob Cobbing Welcom
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Yet, as I have said before, Bob Cob
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Both afford ample evidence of Cobbi
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Bob Cobbing: A Talk Given at Boat T
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3. Published by Writers Forum in 20
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Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

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