Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

except that Cobbing had his own script.
The degree of full collaboration in the book is minimal because the feedback loop had not been
completed. Hawkins responded to visual material with a linear response and then the book
appeared. With Cobbing being, in addition to collaborator, also the designer, printer and publisher,
it is not surprising if he felt more at ease with the product than Hawkins.
However, wide apart as the different making processes may have been, I do not see any reason to
see the makers as engaging in separate practice. If the performance was a little more of a jam
session than it might have been and a little less of a definitive performance, if such a thing is either
desired or possible... well, I can live with that. I enjoyed it.
The wide gulf between the kinds of material in G Curled Ribbon is deceptive. (Apart from
everything else, we should remember that both poets’ names are on the book in its entirety.)
Cobbing’s work ranges from the linear into many areas of the visual: this book finds him at the far
end of one axis of his engagement with the literal.
There is, too, an interesting element to G Curled Ribbon, in that it contains clear evidence of its
process; and retains its sources. How often I have sought to restrain a yawn as, at the front of the
room, the poet I have come to hear read has told a string of anecdotes to explain the background to
their writing with the clear separation of experience and/or material and the poem based on or in
that experience and/or material. G Curled Ribbon gives us the whole thing, both as product and as
stimulus material for further production.
Given this dual nature and the disparity of kinds of texts, it is unlikely that there will be any one
possible definitive performance.
In performance, the utterance that we make may be directly (reading) or indirectly (improvising
from) related to the text, but so much depends on context; and in that way there is a great
similarity between the linear text and the visual. The linear text can be read in many ways,
because the notational element is so small. The reader provides much that is only implicit in the
text.
Similarly with a visual text.
Of course, the visual text is not made in the context of a consensus as to its utterance, but some
consensus may be reached by sympathetic performers working with similar or related
assumptions. The longer you work together the greater the empathy, with good will. (Thus,
Cobbing and I work together without much difficulty, even though we do not agree on the nature
of the connection between mark and sound in the texts we use.)
It seems to me that G Curled Ribbon is a hybrid, where Hawkins was doing something different to
Cobbing compositionally, responding to semantic or semantically-associated elements in the
visual material, while Cobbing was working visually in order, later, to utter his visual production.
The book is good to look at, but it lacks an integration between the two textual elements, though
there is a sympathetic correspondence. And that I think is where the problem lay, if there is one, at