Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

inevitable. I am not sure it was so. In some ways it may have been a high point in worldly terms;
though maybe that was the Coach House Press selection in 1976.
He kept going before and after... before and after every event.
To what extent the nonsense at The Poetry Society had a negative effect upon him and his work, I
cannot say. I don’t think it helped. It was, in many ways, inevitable: inevitable that it would happen,
inevitable that careerism and mediocrity would win out; it always does.
People have written theses about Bob since but I have yet to see anything much as good as some
of what is in this book.
Few engage with him as what we might now call an intermedia artist. Few see his post 1970s
work as an ongoing development and expansion of what had gone before.
Many now seem to see Writers Forum as some kind of SME; and both it and Bob as something to
be taken over or bought up and packaged.
Few address his publishing for what it is: a call to cooperative and collaborative arms and alms in
an implicit assertion that practice comes before theory, if the practice is to be any good.
So what happened in 1974? In this context! Well, a lot of idealism. Witness the farce at The Poetry
Society supported in words by a lot of people who said they were all for what we were doing and
they’d be along to help maybe next week, sorry, not this week.
And Bob managed to show, seemingly effortlessly but in fact by hard work and attentiveness, just
what could be done in Poetry and for Poetry; and what could be done in publishing by stressing
idealism and ethics rather than entrepreneurship.
There was a lot of politics in that; but he didn’t say much about that; he did it.
Thank you.