Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

Introduction to Bob Cobbing at Sub Voicive Poetry
(11th July 2000)
I have spoken here of Bob Cobbing on a number of occasions, and there is no point in repeating
myself. Yet tonight’s reading must be prefaced, not to point out its importance but because it is so
important, our reading to mark Bob’s coming 80th birthday. And yet to say something both new
and useful in the short time I shall allow myself is rather difficult. Without time to expand and
develop ideas, one needs to make general observations; but one does not want to waffle.
Generalisations often turn into waffle. Nevertheless, the attempt must be made; and I shall start
with a fundamental observation.
Bob Cobbing’s poetry is diverse. This is particularly apparent if the poetry is viewed procedurally
instead of chronologically or by subject matter.
Those who were here last week may recall my exchange with Bob, which occurred as part of the
announcements. Advertising tonight’s event, I asked Bob ‘Am I right that you won’t be doing any
sound pieces as such?’ I knew what I meant! Bob denied my question, quite validly: he would, he
said, be performing linear verbal poetry, but sound would come considerably into it.
As soon as he said that, the slackness of my question was exposed.
Our terminology is often inadequate to refer easily to poetry that is so wide-ranging, formally and
methodologically, but which tends to be consonant and organically coherent as a set of active
responses.
Bob Cobbing’s poetry is expressive, but not anecdotally self-expressive.
There are often stories which could be attached to the poems; and many of his poems could be
called “occasional writing” (which is not, for me, an abusive term); but the poems come first,
remaining after the details of their composition have been somewhat forgotten.
Cobbing’s poems may exist in multiple forms and versions. A text may stand alone, but it’s likely
that it has cousins and friends. Though it stands alone, it exists to be, in performance, instigative of
solo utterance or multiple voice or percussion or dance et cetera, or mixtures of those.
The poetry is, of itself, various; the ways of our seeing it are diverse; there is no one way of
cataloguing it. To look at this work openly, one may need to revise almost all criteria; only to find
those revised criteria repeatedly falling short of the phenomena one had thought they might
measure.
Serendipity and contingency feature strongly in the composition, the performance and the
curation of Bob Cobbing’s poetry; and it seems to me that much of it asks, by answering in
exemplary manner, the implicit question: What possibilities are there here? Whether that “here”
refers to a sound environment; a visual environment; a nexus of formal or material constraints; a