Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

A L’aveuglette
Cobbing claimed that the sequence had been written in a few days during the Christmas 1964/
New Year holiday. Often, he added to that claim that he had influenza at the time of writing and had
drunk Scotch whiskey to alleviate the symptoms.
I am in no position to deny or even doubt that he had influenza. Nor that he drank whiskey.
However, it has occurred to me that the story, whatever its reliability as fact, might be seen as
being a little defensive, initially at least, before he could be sure of the tone of wide reception of the
book.
I can say no more than that. I did not know him then. By the time I met him, perhaps five years
later, he was rather confident of his achievements; but I suspect that he would always have seemed
that confident. Nevertheless, I find it an odd story which, it seems to me, he adapted later to a
different kind of defensiveness whereby he made light of the poems’ perceived brilliance. They
contain no delirium or intoxication. Sound Poems is work of great clarity:
Bombast bombast
Bomb bomb bomb bast
Bombast
Emphas
Em- em- em- phase
Bombast emphase
Bombast
Phebus
If he finished it, dotting each letter I as it were, with drink and or a virus in his veins, that is
something else, because it had been the work of many months at least to get to that point in the
writing.
Then there is the variety of approaches, formal approaches. ‘He is just playing with word sounds’,
someone has said [4]. Yes, he is playing; but I hesitate at and even object to just playing. Play is the
basis for almost all learning; and it is “learning” which is the process necessary to keep art from
degenerating into the flaccidity of entertainment. (Art is often entertaining; but it is not much if
that is all it is.)
It may be that the more we play the more we learn; and I want to go further than any of these
statements and assert that play is the basis of all art even though some art is rather serious. These
poems are serious for all their joie de vivre. What may alarm some readers, or give them pause to
shut themselves out from the poetry, is that the verse does not offer itself for reduction into prose
statement of the functional kind.
I am seeking here to differentiate purposes in writing. I see no validity in the idea that verse is
different to prose, a priori, in terms of its value. It is clearly different in a number of mechanical
ways; but it is useful to avoid, in this context, all sense that prose is superior to or inferior to
verse.