Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

After a workshop performance, and everything done at the workshop is a performance, if
someone else is moved to comment on what they have witnessed, they do so. The ethos inculcated
by Cobbing is to comment positively, if there is any comment.
You don’t say something is badly done; you say how it could be done better.
This too creates a self-critical atmosphere in which the poet her- or himself will tend to identify
problems for themselves, under the pressure of performance to peers, rather than under the
pressure of others’ opinions; and they may well seek advice in the interval or afterwards, over a
beer; so that, except when a newcomer blunders in and comments before picking up the regulars’
habits, the inexperienced or insecure are rarely exposed to harsh criticism until and if they are
both ready for it and in need of it. The emphasis is on the individual’s creativity, not on training it
to match the creative behaviour of others.
The workshops are avowedly experimental, yet Bob does not exclude anyone.
Sometimes people continue coming back even when their work is quite at variance with the
approaches of the others; and their own practice usually expands as a result.
I don’t quite know what I’d do without the workshops. I had to stay away for several meetings in a
row during the early part of 2002 and I felt the lack. It’s an emotionally safe place to try things out.
You can screw up and it doesn’t matter in social terms.
And yet it creates a desire to do the best one can; I often rehearse at home before going to the
workshop, although usually what I do at the workshop diverges from what has been rehearsed.
Many who have come to the workshop have been offered publication by Writers Forum, Cobbing’s
own small press. He is the most sympathetic of publishers who, though he will take risks, never
publishes work that he does not believe in. Through his editing and publishing, he has repeatedly
brought out some of the best in others, which other others may not have seen.
Writers Forum alone would be a considerable achievement. At the time of writing, June 2002, it
has published about 1100 items over at least 40 years, or roughly one every two weeks; and it is
still active despite Cobbing’s age and growing infirmity. There is still a need for it.
I’ve spoken here of collaboration. Bob Cobbing is an inveterate collaborator. On one level, one can
see collaboration as a way of completing projects—e.g. you need a particular kind of voice so you
go out and get it... But there’s more to it than that in Cobbing’s practice. Whether on tape or on the
page or in performance, he tends to produce work which is person-specific so that not only does
Cobbing get new Cobbing art, by working with others, but enables others to make what they
would not otherwise have made, might not have thought of making.
Bob Cobbing was hardly a young man when George MacBeth brought his work to a wider
audience via radio; and he seems to have hit that ground running. In the 10 years or so following
publication of ABC in Sound took his own writing and, conceptually, Poetry in general (for those
who wished to follow) through an astonishing series of developments and leaps. Much of his work
at that time remains exemplary.