Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

they know enough, to ask themselves if they trust a poem or set of poems: the kind of trust
involved in friendship and love.
Never mind about whether it fits the categories you have; categories are made to follow limited
evidence; and when we run into them then perhaps they are in the wrong place. Is it poetry—if
the poet says so? Germaine Greer resurrected this one recently, of art in general; but, for all her
cleverness, she left out any limitation. Any biped, apparently, is free to declare what they have done
as art.
It’s a point of view; but I find it alien. I find it alien in the way that, when the aliens assert their
presence, all our electrical processes come to a stop. So you allow the self-declared artist to declare
her output art; but you can’t logically say much, beyond description, because you have already
defined art without reference to any form of Virtue.
It’s a Behaviourists’ view of art. It works; it’s defensible; and it’s as useful as a cheap sugary drink.
Cobbing’s approach to self-serving debates was to make new work; lots of it; probably declaring
himself unable to understand the issues. When a colleague gave Bob the Bob Cobbing chunk of his
doctorate, Bob asked me if I had read it and if I understood. I said I thought so; he said he didn’t
and he’d cut it up and made a poem. The second part of that was true.
A few years on, the work Bob made, masses of it, stands out, in general, from gimmicky selfdeclarative
claptrap of the time. That stuff can be studied, but it won’t be heard or seen with
pleasure. The question of trust doesn’t arise there because few of us want to be near it anyway.
I have chosen not to clutter the exhibition with too many images, hoping that visitors will
concentrate on what is shown; and that they will ask themselves that there might be song signals
to be found
Song Signals was the title of his 1972 book; but it is also a useful term for all of his work, all of
which was intended to be sounded or imagined sounded.
The variety of his approaches that I have illustrated is wide though; and you may think that you
have understood what he’s about only to find that, next, he offers an entirely different approach. I
have deliberately not arranged the images chronologically to obviate any temptation to a reading
of historical development.
I do not think it works simply like that.
He repeated himself but not by an exact repetition. It is the repetition of an artist still learning.
Cobbing’s innovation is, I believe, always formal; and that may be more clear here in an art gallery
than in an overtly poetry context.
Cobbing emphasised his poetical essence, and quite rightly, but what he meant by Poetry was
rather inclusive. Poetry, as he meant it, tended to include many or perhaps all of the other arts.
Cobbing innovated, genuinely, and without noticing. He did it as part of trying to be better at