Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

Bells, Whistles; and Sounds and Words
This article derives from recent experiences in making poetry this spring and summer; and from a
number of exchanges on the British and Irish Poets List. I have reworked some of my messages,
front-channel and back-channel, quoting them directly into this text without much reference to
the previous discussion.
I am aware of the visual appearance of my writing, using the spacing and lineation, sometimes, to
score reading aloud, using typographical and visual effects as attenuations and extensions of the
alphabet, which, as I have remarked elsewhere, is a poor notational system.
Nevertheless, much of my writing is published in linear form, with relatively little formatting and
little or no graphical addition to the standard alphabet. Like many others, I often refer to such
writing, of my own and of others, as “linear verse”; and I often refer to the rest of my writing as
“visual text”.
The latter is in widespread use, but we use the term often without making entirely clear what we
mean by it. The danger of that might be that our usage will become sloppy and ambiguous. On the
other hand, too close a definition leads to exceptions or exclusions, both of which are not useful. In
my case, the use of “visual” in this phrase indicates poetry which is not limited to plain or slightly
formatted text in lines but which also is not necessarily concrete poetry.
I do not propose here to say what merit there may be in distinguishing between visual poetry and
concrete poetry. Not only are such terms used in different ways by different practitioners and
critics; but I am at a loss to know how to reconcile these differences. I recall discussing this with
Derek Beaulieu when he was preparing what was published as Courier: An Anthology of Concrete
and Visual Poetry [1] and expressing my concern about the wide use of the term “concrete poetry”
and consequent dilution of any meaning it may still have; yet also having to express my concern,
and dismay, that I had no alternative suggestion.
My use of the word “text” in “visual text”, instead of “poem”, is an avoidance of arguments over
whether or not what I am talking about is poetry! That’s a line of inquiry which I find
unproductive.
In fact, disputes about the nature and category of what one is doing are more likely to occur when
poems are taken from the page and performed, and at that point, when visual poetry meets sound
poetry. There isn’t even an agreed vocabulary for the transition and what happens there.
As Bob Cobbing and I demonstrated in Word Score Utterance Choreography [2], the practice here is
extremely various; and one cannot simply say that the performance of a visual poem/text is a
sound poem because a great many practitioners will disagree. The inherited word “reading”
hardly does it; and “performance” has all sorts of connotations.
Recently Ralph Hawkins and Bob Cobbing launched their collaborative publication G Curled Ribbon
by performance [3]. A look at G Curled Ribbon may be illuminating in this context because it links
two entirely different praxes whose practitioners know each other’s practice well and with mutual