Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

Until the late 70s, that talent took him repeatedly to Fylkingen in Stockholm, where he was able to
work with and among others—musicians and poet/musicians—performing and making works
on tape.
Generally, he did not do his own engineering. He left that to others. It isn’t that he couldn’t have
acquired those skills; but that wasn’t where he was at.
The exceptions include his Fylkingen pieces of the mid-70s, which were engineered by him; and
they are processually different to the other engineered work.
A version of The Five Vowels used and exploited the localised acoustic properties of an old stone
staircase in Facklan, the disused cinema on Östgötagatan which then housed the Fylking.
He had access to a studio full of processes and effects at his disposal, but preferred to sound his
way up and down that staircase, working with the space in an attempt to make the piece in one
take.
Round Dance, which was made either the same year or a year one side or other of The Five Vowels,
uses speed changes and overlay of a previously recorded performance of the text by him and me
in an otherwise empty echoing auditorium.
While he had been perfectly happy for his ideas to be realised by complicated technological
methods, his own inclination was to use simple techniques, but in such a way as to suggest and
encourage implicit complexity.
That’s how his poetry works—puns, permutations, progressions, jump cuts.
Jump cut.
Bob Cobbing’s many activities over and above the making of poetry reflect his regard for the
straightforward and simple. Look at the fourteen hundred publications he was largely responsible
for. Look at their means of production.
Simple sophistication.
And look at his workshops, still running after half a century on the simple premise of allowing
space and time for poets to be heard in a sympathetic environment so that each may learn from
each without point-scoring, an environment in which the focus is on poetry and not on the
individual making it.
I value that workshop more than any; and yet it operates on a simple unadorned idea.
When asked once what he called his poetry, poetry or music, he replied ‘Depends who’s paying’—
but all of it was derived from human linguistic utterance and the sign systems associated with it.
But his openness and clear-headedness enabled him to work in almost any genre.