Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

When we worked together on Domestic Ambient Noise from 1994 to 2000, I used computers quite
often to write visually; and because the process worked by varying each other’s material, pixelbased
d. m. p., ink jet and laser imagery entered into his body of work from me, though not
exclusively from me by any means. Often in that and other work, switching between technologies
was part of the process—note that one of the filters in Adobe’s Photoshop is “photocopying”!
Towards the end of his life he had a colour photocopier and produced some interesting colour
material.
There are two things to be said here. One is that, by our economic standards, the process was
hideously expensive; and the other is a belief in Cobbing’s words that ‘there are more colours in
black and white’.
He and I made a couple of titles on a single pass photocopier, laying down each layer of colour
separately—because that was the only way that our technology allowed us to do it. That was very
near to silk-screening.
I can’t remember any poetry as such that he made alone on that single pass copier, although that
may just be my memory; but colour appears in some Writers Forum publications.
With the later machine, acquired around the turn of the millennium, one saw him beginning to
take control. It was easy to get some results—with the earlier machine there was the
compensation of working with another for all that effort, and he liked co-operative working—and
he started to use them and, as it were, train them.
And throughout he was using found materials and not necessarily treating them.
Cobbing’s poems were always for performance. In the 60s he was producing “eye version” and
“ear version”. (He wasn’t really a concrete poet as I was taught to understand that term.) He
developed the landscape version of a poem and that’s largely an aural landscape.
At the same time, he was happy to explore or have explored other ways of notating potential
sound. Note, for example, his acceptance of the visual treatment of ‘Variations on a Theme of Tan’
from Sound Poems/ABC in Sound—recently brought back into print by Writers Forum. That is not
his visual version although the typewritten text is his; but it is now how most of us know it. And
note also his collaboration with Lawrence Casserley which, in the case of ‘Hydrangea’ produced
two versions. The first was in the mid-70s, an image sourced in dry print, made up of the letters of
the word. The second, in the mid-80s, was more of a musical score, still allowing a considerable
degree of improvisation—four of us performed it in the autumn of 2003 and there was plenty of
scope for invention—putting some guidelines down for what might (not what might not) be done.
Sometimes he would read a text very closely, other times loosely. I have noted an instance when he
read a flier of mine advertising readings, but upside down. Sometimes he would read the room as a
text. (Reading in this context of course means starting from but moving out from a text.)
Thus, the visual manipulations, xeroxographic or otherwise, were not entirely an end in