Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

Comparing it with specific painters would mislead us and likely demean Cobbing’s work; but some
ignorant types have made comparisons with Pollock: any comparison to Pollock, except perhaps in
the idiosyncratic difference to almost everything else that has been done, would be misleading.
Cobbing liked Pollock’s painting; but that’s something else.
One needs to look carelessly to think that it’s like Pollock. In Cobbing’s work, the image has been
placed carefully in all its parts and the means of delivering it to the carrier paper has been
mechanically controlled at a remove.
The process of the reproduction of the poem has its own method within the generic method of
ink-duplication.
It’s not the layering of pigment that you get with, say, Auerbach. The ink would never dry! It’s of a
different kind. The blackness of these pages stands out because it is so unexpected and perhaps
because many of us know it is so difficult to achieve. He pushed the duplicator beyond its intended
capabilities by a long way.
It isn’t just putting more and more colour on. It may feel that the ink is thickly applied as one looks
at it, but actually it isn’t like that. There is only one application here, one pass through the
machine.
There may be a connection here with his often repeated Cagean advice that if a performance
wasn’t working then one kept going till it did. Not that I suggest that this poem didn’t work at an
earlier stage. I mean that there is a point or points, extremes to some maybe, at which the poem
works; it may be difficult to access that point; but one just sticks to it till one gets there.
He did put the paper through the machine twice on some occasions. He did that in Winter Poem 1
where, it seems he judged, the only way to get two quite different effects of very light ink output
and very heavy ink output in much the same space was to use two different stencils. Note,
therefore, that he knew where the apparently impossible became actually impossible; and he had
a way round it.
It is, of course, for that reason that each image copy made by Cobbing was slightly different to all
the others, because registration is not the ink duplicator’s strongest point.
Thus, one could not use this fix in every situation. Mixing non-alphabetic image and text would be
difficult to handle with a misregistering printing machine; so that, as Mottram noted the
appropriateness of design to the contents of Writers Forum publications, printing techniques were
also applied as appropriate. Simply put, Cobbing knew what he was doing; it was just that he was
doing things few people had thought of. And he didn’t say what he was doing. Instead he urged you
to read the products attentively. That makes more sense. He wanted people to enjoy the outputs,
rather than write about them, copying quotes from him, without engaged understanding.
Look at the blackness of these pages; and remember that the title is Lightsong 2. Where’s the light?
Is it the white or is it the black? I’d say it’s both. I’d say that as a text for reading he would have
been reading the differences, the changes, the conversation between the background of the paper