Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

Celebrating the Memory of Bob Cobbing At Sub Voicive Poetry
(2003)
[Sub Voicive Poetry staged a series of celebrations of Cobbing in the early years of this millennium.
This was the brief introduction to the first.]
We have been saddened by the death of Bob Cobbing, but tonight we are celebrating him. And let
us remember that he lived to a decent age, declaring himself in the last days of his life to be happy.
He was in action right to the end of his life despite increasing infirmity and physical immobility
directing the activities of Writers Forum the day before he died.
In case anyone here does not know, Writers Forum passed to me and Adrian Clarke jointly—the
last workshop was two days ago, and the next is on 24th of this month—and the latest Writers
Forum publication is on sale tonight.
Bob’s artistic career was a lifelong affair, but he was recognised internationally as a major artist
for the last 4 decades of his life, from the publication of ABC in Sound.
And the range of artists who acknowledged him then with enthusiasm speaks for itself, from the
various artists working at the Fylking in Stockholm to Henri Chopin to Dom Sylvester Houédard—
and I am mentioning only a few.
The ABC is deceptive. It can appear simple. But its sophistication is immediately apparent in its
performance.
It is a masterwork. And it releases its meanings with benign slyness.
Don’t be fooled by Cobbing’s stories about one or both of flu and whiskey, whether they are true or
not.
It is one of many masterworks.
That binary of eye and ear throughout Cobbing’s work is a cleaving in both senses, what he
originally called, following Dom Sylvester Houédard, eye and ear versions feed back to each other.
But despite that continuity, in the decade following ABC, Cobbing’s work performed an
extraordinary leap.
I centre that in Sonic Icons, but one could place it in several other titles—in this case we have the
intermediate stages resulting from new properties that Cobbing’s work accreted—for example, the
idea of the graphical being readable into utterance; the idea of text on the page as being a
landscape.
I’d also identify among his major works the processual series and Domestic Ambient Noise. Many