Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

Bob Cobbing and Eric Mottram Celebration
(18th Jan 2000)
Tonight, Bob Cobbing gives the Eric Mottram Celebration Reading.
Both men, Bob and Eric, undertook considerable amounts of the basic hard work involved in
building the infrastructure, to slightly stretch the word, of what Mottram later called The British
Poetry Revival. A major physical and emblematic manifestation of that hard work was the gradual
but steady change in the make up of The Poetry Society’s General Council, 30 years ago; the
appointment of Eric Mottram as editor of Poetry Review; and changes in the activities of the
Society which were spurred on, to no small degree, by the fact of Mottram’s editorship.
As repeatedly-re-elected Treasurer of The Poetry Society/National Poetry Centre, Bob Cobbing
was involved with many of the practicalities of publishing Eric Mottram’s Poetry Review, and some
of them are quite bizarre—ask him about the printer who was worried he was printing obscenity
—just as he had been among those who made it possible for Eric to be appointed to the editorship
in the first place.
As an aside, anticipating future statements malicious towards Eric’s reputation, from at least one
source, let me quote a message by Ric Caddel, dated 20th November 1998, to the British and Irish
Poets List: ‘legends of a collapse-in-sales of Poetry Review in the Mottram era... have no place in a
serious critical argument’. As Bill Griffiths has pointed out, the figures, such as they are, suggest
an increase in sales. Sales are, of course, no indicator of quality anyway.
When the Arts Council of Great Britain put the financial squeeze on all the Society’s activities, it
was Cobbing primarily who got his head round the problem and came up with the solution we
adopted, helped to found the Consortium of London Presses, and organised volunteers to set up
and run the print shop which printed in-house not only Poetry Review but a mass of other
publications under a welter of existing and ad hoc imprints.
Cobbing, in the form of Writers Forum, published Eric Mottram’s first book of poetry, Inside the
Whale, in 1970; and he continued to be one of Mottram’s poetry publishers until and beyond
Mottram’s death with Local Movement (1973), Precipice of Fishes (1979), Season of Monsters:
Poems 1989-1990 (1991), Inheritance: Masks Book One, Poems 1993-1994 (1994) and,
posthumously, Pollock Record.
Writers Forum also published Towards Design in Poetry in 1977.
Eric Mottram championed Bob Cobbing in print with, among others, A Prosthetics of Poetry: The
Art of Bob Cobbing in Second Aeon 16-17 (1973) and Writers Forum: A Successful Campaign in
Ceolfrith 26 (1974) and Introductions to publications.
Just before Eric died, I invited him to write a further appreciation of Bob’s work for what became
the tribute to Bob Cobbing section of And # 9 with which we marked Bob’s 75th birthday. But of
course that was, to my knowledge, never even started.