Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

However, there is functional writing which says one thing at a time and as unambiguously as
possible: business letters, instruction manuals, this essay—and, unfortunately, quite a lot of verse.
Of course, to say that Cobbing’s poems cannot be reduced to prose statement is not to say that
they are poems without meaning.
On the contrary, their lack of reducibility to statements is a reminder that no poem worth the label
“poem” can be reduced to functional statements. Prosaic meanings may be extracted; but a great
deal would be lost thereby. As William Wordsworth wrote in 1798:
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Too often, if what has been lost to the main abstracted discourse, by exclusion, is mentioned in the
analyst’s account of their investigation, it, the excluded material, is necessarily rendered as a mode
of decoration because it is seen as not intrinsic. Thus, a poem’s rhyme scheme, rhythmic structure
and other aspects of its versification, including its form and diction, are often taught as supporting
the poem’s meaning rather than being part of it, effectively an unsayable part in colloquial terms.
Nowadays, in UK schools, many aspects of poetry are not mentioned adequately in its teaching;
and, widely, poems are liable to be seen as odd or “fun” ways of saying something which is more
clearly said in other ways. Cobbing’s Sound Poems strongly suggest that Poetry is a form of
meaning other than “prose meaning”.
The mechanism of the poem is different from the approach of the instruction manual or the selfhelp
book, neither of which even attempt what C. S. Lewis called ‘The doubling, splitting, and
recombining of thoughts… the counterpoint of the mind, the mastery of doubled and trebled
vision’, [5] which Poetry offers—if we exclude unintentional ambiguity in manuals et cetera arising
from linguistic incompetence!
Not all will agree with me, but I shall still assert that Poetry concerns itself primarily with telling
Truth. (This is sometimes far removed from the identification and uncovering of “truths”, a search
which is almost certainly the hunt for a philosopher’s stone.)
Yet, what a poem says, what we are told by the voice or voices of the poem, may not be factually
true, or not tenable by the lights of the reader. Take, for example, Milton’s 1655 poem ‘On the Late
Massacre in Piedmont’. There is a lot in that with which I disagree; yet I greatly value the poem. It
depends on the broadness of the definition of “truth” that one uses. Something approaching Keats’
much quoted ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ [6] might perhaps be my choice. (That is, there is more
to “truth” than what is deemed to be functionally useful.)
When a poem includes the word “I” followed by a verb, the reader is ill advised to believe she is
being told something which has happened factually. In a poem, “I walk”, “I love”, “I see” et cetera
are propositions rather than data about physical behaviour. In the worldview of prose readers, we
might argue that Poetry offers us models of the existential in all its complexity, which becomes
mere tangled complication if we try to cherry-pick from it.