Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

Cobbing: You can’t escape it.
I can say from personal experience that reflects Cobbing’s opinion throughout the period. I do not
say that his attitude did not change; but the changes such as they were, reflected changes of
emphasis.
I imagine him learning at some point, probably rather early, of the category “sound poetry” and
finding it approximated to what he did or wanted to do. As an existing category, it gave him
permission; but it also constrained. It obviated those who proscribed with “that’s not poetry” but
it left him open to discussions of the category; and I am unsure how much he welcomed that.
Going back to Hanson’s essay and to the interview in Riding the Meridian, there is this:
Cobbing: […] Music and sound poetry are not the same thing at all. […] sound poetry is
much more concerned with articulated speech than it is with melody and harmony and so
on. It may sound like music sometimes but it’s much nearer to speech than it is to music.
Upton: That’s really interesting. I don’t really disagree with you. But you have used the word
“song” in your—
Cobbing: All right, I called a publication Song Signals, but I still don’t think the result is song.
[…] The notation is stimulus for sound and a lot of people wouldn’t distinguish between what
we do and song; but I do. I think what we do is articulated speech rather than song.
Despite his informed awareness of how Bob classified his poetry, Hanson stresses the taperecorder
and recording studio, the basic tools of text-sound composition, as both a new medium
and as a means of analysis of the poet’s own voice. He sees “taped works” and “live performances”
as likely outcomes of such analysis.
Hanson’s judgment of the literary rather than musical attributes of the tape work that he sees as
Cobbing’s most assured work matches Cobbing’s judgments of 1999. When I was working on the
Hanson essay, for its inclusion in the Ceolfrith book, I asked Bob how he reacted to what Hanson
had said (including, for instance, that there was a lack of confidence in his means of expression
prior to 1999); and he said that he agreed with everything Hanson said.
And yet, in ‘An Approach to Notation’, he describes his “blotting” poems in Song Signals [4] as ‘very
musical… and seems to need instrumental participation as well as voices’.
He makes this statement after telling us ‘it is used for its sound and visual qualities rather than its
objective meaning’; but I am not sure that the assertion of its musicality is explained. That seems
to me to inhere in Cobbing’s expectation of how it will be read as notation rather than in the
notation itself.
Further on, he refers to Jerome Rothenberg’s saying that ‘in Navajo experience poetry and music
and dance haven’t suffered separation’. For me, that sits uncomfortably with his claim that music
and sound poetry are not the same, along with his endorsement of Hanson’s analysis.