Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

Children Safe in the Sea?, Song Signals, the silk-screen Portrait of Robin Crozier, Processual and
others were new territory.
That, I suggest, is a generative way to view this work.
It has been said that Cobbing’s work is all the same: it is the same in the way that each of his
poems is unlike the majority of the rest and most unlike the generality of what passes for poetry.
Call that “innovation” if you want. I think you may be missing the important point.
The idea of not offering a chronological exhibition is to encourage you to take each piece on its
own terms in so far as those terms are discernible to you.
If you are troubled at all by awareness that these works are said to be linguistic, then just put that
out of your mind. If he were here, I know that Bob’s approach would be to start from where you
are.
If it doesn’t bother you, then you might ask yourself what that means and what it might or could
mean.
Cobbing was a generous encourager of others. He was patient. He wasn’t much taken by laziness.
He hated disloyalty and dishonesty. He was impatient with that.
He never had much interest in controlling.
I make that last comment because it was asserted on BBC Radio 4 last week that he excluded
poetry which was not like his or not to his liking from the programme of The Poetry Society. (He
never had such power over the events programme. Any member of the general council of The
Poetry Society, like the accuser, would know that.)
It was also said by the same person that ‘Beethoven Today’ works on variations on both words of
the title. Well, there are two versions of that poem here and you may check the gentleman’s
reliability.
Perhaps the struggle of the 1970s, in what has been called “The Poetry Wars”, was not for
Modernism; but between Mediocrity and however we describe its opposite. (We can’t really say
“excellence” because the word has already been hijacked to the service of Mediocrity.)
Cobbing as campaigner sought, amongst other things, to open the door to all Poetries against the
wishes of a de facto Mediocrity elite which limited access to a few forms; and that included
including what was then usually called “experimental”. This was happening already; Cobbing was
part of a zeitgeist. He was regarded as an experimentalist; but he did not want it to stop there.
From Cobbing, I learned first to listen to Ornette Coleman. I also read Vachel Lindsey and Charlotte
Mew.
Those mediocre poets we’d hear of then had followed The Movement et cetera; now some
followed the “experimental” or “the Americans” and so on. (I simplify grossly.)