Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

medium; a method; or certain materials, lexical or otherwise.
The answers embedded in these questions are so rich that they ask their questions reflexively, in a
readerly form: What are the possibilities for reading/performing this? Leaving the nature of “this”
open. In short, many Cobbing poems ask both what do we know & how do we know it.
Shorter still: Where in the poem are we?
I am not saying this is unique to Cobbing.
Bob Cobbing revisits themes almost incessantly, whilst transposing and varying his content
material. The musical connotation (of transposition) is intentional. One should also think of the
painter identifying in visual utterance the same constellation of visual events by different lights on
different days.
So themes and subjects change, largely asynchronously, and repeat; methods change and repeat,
mimicking each other’s effects and affects, emphasising thereby their partial differences. In that
way, the work, seen collectively, is about itself, meditatively but not self-referentially, because
“itself” here is poetic activity in general. Since the first ABC in Sound, if not before, Bob Cobbing’s
poetry has been, amongst other things, rumination upon the characteristics of the poetic.
And that takes me back, quite deliberately, to my remark about organic coherence. The
accumulating work grows at its tips, and on its old wood, which is still supple. And the new growth
is both new and a direct development of what has gone before.
The scale of Bob Cobbing’s innovation is great, perhaps in a number of senses. Look at ABC in
Sound published in 1965; and then at Song Signals published in 1972; and you’ll see its extent over
those few years, how far he moved from type-based lineation, though he became more
thoroughgoing still in his apparent departure. Such radicalism might distract from the degree to
which he has retained his concern for and involvement with the linear and lexical. Look at his
work in the book plouk, which he and I made recently, and you’ll see both of those properties, alive
and mutational. Cobbing’s originality is radical in many senses, producing hybrids and cultivars,
and welcoming sports.
Then there is the bewilderment, a denotative confusion, induced in some by poetry which glories in
the versatility of our linguistic faculties and the degree to which we can find convincing analogues
for the brain’s multifarious association and synthesis by treating all the arts as if they are facets of
one art.
Bob has chosen not to work as narrowly as many poets, including, in particular, those who see his
practice as narrow. His poetry is extensible and open-ended, unfinishing work, producing
connotative complexity. Its content discloses, with generosity and purpose, the method of its own
origination and organisation: open, elegant transformations and expansions, usually made
stepwise, though with many steps implicit or assumed, phenomena themselves rather than being
abstractions from phenomena - an inclusive and accepting poetic, permitting and encouraging
participation, collaboration and enjoyment.