Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

the level of the book rather than at the level of individual poetic.
I question that a problem exists because I quite like the unintegrated feel of the book. It seems to
ask: What do I sound like? It makes us ask: Why? What it isn’t is an illustrated book. It doesn’t tell a
story although it is full of fragmented stories. It asks the witnessing reader for the story. The
feeling that it isn’t complete is quite welcome even if that makes it less than conventionally
entertaining.
Some “edginess” and “embarrassment” was identified in Hawkins... Well, some edginess and
embarrassment can be productive. Before a performance of Domestic Ambient Noise [5], I have
often thought: I’m not sure how this is going to sound? What is this is doing to my/our text? How
will this come across? Would I/should I have agreed to do this (if I’d known)? And from such
edginess comes the energy that gives the performance its edge. It’s a matter of context, and of
expectation.
If it’s not an illustrated book then it’s a visual text. I think anything can be a visual text. I see no
reason not to think that anything can be a visual text. I see no use in identifying anything as not a
visual text. I do see possible problems in identifying anything as not a visual text. I’d prefer to be
descriptive rather than prescriptive.
It follows for me that the best we can do is to say what kinds of visual text are or have been in use
and try to spot what kinds of visual text might now be made.
Sometimes, for denotative purposes, I make a distinction between “the linear text” and “the
visual”; but I do not think that such a distinction is widely applicable.
In much visual work, not least Cobbing’s, the visual retains, and sometimes acquires, linearity.
These differences and similarities were what Cobbing and I set ourselves to investigate post-DAN
[Domestic Ambient Noise], although we did not express it that way to each other at the time. We
set up some procedures in draft form and went away from each other for the purpose of
generating our individual starting materials. We haven’t yet (July 2000) met to take it further; but,
at the same time, we have been making two other sequences of which the latter, plouk [6], is
relevant here.
The starting point is printed material, advertisements, fliers etc. that have been sampled and the
samples transformed. It retains its alphabetical origins; I might be prepared to argue that it is very
heavily formatted text; it cannot, though, be “read” as if it were only alphabetical—the formatting
has gone beyond the supportive.
I tried using the term “visually-emphatic text” which, whatever its virtues as terminology, is a
mouthful, though it has been used by others at least once!
The point was to argue that “it” is “all” one field of practice with the individual instances
differently-located along various axes. So not something which is a separate genre or sub genre
but poetry which emphasises one aspect of itself to a great extent.