Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

By the time of Cobbing’s death, the slowest wits were beginning to see his probable importance;
and, unfortunately, some were soon making sure they were seen on the right side, assuring us,
unreliably, that they had always been supportive. They gave their accounts.
It’s understandable, if reprehensible; but it blurs the picture.
In the last twelve months, I have corrected major statements of fact about Bob Cobbing and about
Writers Forum which have been made, apparently, in respected institutions of learning by some
who knew him, and by those who did not.
A few quote him out of context, or make it up, or attribute to him views that were not his in
defence of their own chosen approaches.
Now… There is a problem in contemporary UK poetry beyond anything the purveyors of official
verse can do.
You will hear, in some circles, the phrase “linguistically innovative poetry”. And, generally, I do not
argue with it.
I do wonder perhaps what worthwhile poetry would not be innovative; and why one needs to say
“linguistically” of a linguistic art.
Sonically innovative music anyone?
Graphically innovative painting?
This terminology is now part of what looks to me like the infrastructure of the industrialisation, for
no apparent reason, of poetry production and consumption. It relies upon simple propositions—if
this then that—which are ok used themselves. In bulk, they move towards artificial expertise and
its mistakes; but, used singly to produce a bulk output, they produce or may produce nothing but
intelligent mediocrity.
I remember the late Hugh MacDiarmid, in the mid 1970s, telling a room full of people: ‘You want to
be poets; you think that you are; but you don’t know enough’.
I think how it works is this: for some reason, you accept without question that poetry held to be
good is innovative; you make sure that you do something differently to everyone else; claim it as
an innovation; and assume you have made poetry.
The contradiction with other approaches is easily resolved by explaining that literature, like all
arts, advances by schools and movements and we are here dealing with a new movement which
interprets the meaning of meaning differently.
High street post-modernism has been a boon to this kind of mentation.
Sometimes “innovative” is an honorific term. A recent Guardian obituary headlined chairman of
Wedgwood Pottery, Sir Arthur Bryan, as “innovative”; but the text of the obituary does not use the