Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

strategy or discuss tactics or to found schools, but to learn from each other at a level where
language almost fails as we try to make better our new linguistic artefacts.
‘An Approach to Notation’ commences with a crafty pedagogical approach by asserting, without
seeming to assert, that there is ‘ear verse with an eye equivalent, eye verse with an ear equivalent’
and verse ‘in which the two aspects are equally important or so closely interwoven as to be almost
inseparable’.
He does this by telling us that Houédard distinguished between them.
Not only does this avoid the proposition that a visually-emphatic poem [7] is a poem, and that
proposition was far more contentious then than now, but it also enables Cobbing to elaborate and
depart from the narrow meaning of “Notation” allowing him to speak of poems visually as such.
That matters when one remembers that Cobbing held that the poem must work visually before
one considers what it might sound like.
This indirect approach takes me back to the idea of Cobbing’s ability to disarm, at least partially,
those who would criticise his aesthetic.
He says of his 1954 poem, ‘Worm’, ‘this poem seemed to need different treatment’ and thus
asserts, implicitly, something that was implied by something he sometimes said, particularly in the
1970s when talking of using recording equipment: ‘making the poem more like itself’.
Making a poem more like itself could mean performing it in such a way that most nearly
represents what the poet wants or imagines the poem to sound like. It could also mean that he felt
his poems, perhaps all poems, had something of the noumenal about them.
I’m sure he did not. And yet…
In his comment on Steve Dwoskin’s version of the poem Cobbing calls here ‘Tan Tandinanan’ (‘He
has very successfully attempted to match the shape of the sound performance with his visual
interpretation’) we are clearly speaking of the poem as it is in the world of time and space; as with
his note to Sound Poems (‘These poems are SOUND poems so much of the creative work must be
done by the reader).
‘Panzoologicomineralogia’, he tells us, ‘is not an exact notation to be followed rigidly’ and then:
‘intended to stimulate the voices into a free and spontaneous interpretation’, an explanation
expanded in Section II as ‘intended for several spontaneous and independent voices, and the layout
enables the voices to find their way around the poem more easily’. That is a rather good definition
of notation, I think.
‘Are your children safe in the sea?’ may be equally indicative; but Cobbing skilfully directs us
around that simplistic categorisation by concentrating on its different history. In terms of his
opening summary of Houédard’s position, it makes the case well and indicates the variety of
Cobbing’s approach.