Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

Bob Cobbing’s Sound Poems
Once, I was inclined to say that Sound Poems is poorly titled. What is a sound poem? Certainly, for
me, his later title, ABC in Sound [1], is more appropriate.
Yet Cobbing usually knew what he was doing, even if it took the rest of us a while to catch up. Now,
I think that his first title was declarative as much as it was descriptive. He was calling attention to a
primary aspect of the poems; and to their sonic qualities; as well as announcing himself to those
others he thought would be interested.
It was not a commercial title; but Writers Forum [2] was not (and is not) a commercially oriented
enterprise; and I imagine that the work was not issued in anticipation of financial gain by sales.
Cobbing’s aim as poet/publisher of Sound Poems was to network, as we might nowadays express
it; and it seems that he succeeded considerably in that. He made contact with a wide range of
artistically influential artists who were excited by his achievement.
Within a short time, he had been invited to the Fylking in Stockholm to make and present new
work; was living, if precariously, as a professional poet; was heard on BBC radio; and, within a
decade, had appeared on the South Bank [3].
Yet, seen retrospectively, “Sound Poems” as a title does not do the poems justice in that they are
also Semantic Poems.
There may have been a shift in his thinking. He wrote: ‘These poems are SOUND poems so much
of the creative work must be done by the reader’. Later, he did not make that distinction of “sound
poems” from all others, just as he only briefly borrowed Dom Sylvester Houédard’s distinction
between an ear version and an eye version of a poem.
He always did think, quite sensibly, that the reader/auditor shares creative activity with the
maker; but that early special plea for a supposed class of poem does not seem to be one that he
adhered to long. There may have been an attempt at advocacy on the part of the unfamiliar in
form and content.
Similarly, the directives (e.g. ‘Rising to Jubilaire’, central section insistent, rising again to ‘Jubilante’)
are introduced—separated from the poems themselves—gently with ‘a few indications may help’
—in other words, there is even more to be said. And, in that context, the layout of the poems (are
they ranged left or centered, and where and why are there line breaks?) become clearly notational,
an idea usually subsumed into the doubtful concept of “intelligent reading”.
On that point, let me refer to ‘An Approach to Notation’ because one thing which strikes me about
that essay is the degree to which Cobbing does not, there, discuss the typewritten poem as
notation. He speaks of ‘type-written or type set poems, where the eye element is minimal’ and
moves on.
That is a strange thing to say. Except perhaps with Braille and audio books, typescript is nothing