Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

And now as poetry more and more becomes product in the eyes of many, contemporary
mediocrities only pretend to be like what they would once have emulated.
They fake a label, like “tradition of Bob Cobbing”, or “tradition of Writers Forum” as if they are
selling fake designer clothes—in a way, they are.
It can be a sociological study. Earlier today I was served by email a do-it-yourself analysis of
Cobbing and Writers Forum, claiming to identify their best traditions—a meta discourse in place of
a descriptive statement when it is the descriptive statement which is needed.
By this method, you exchange denotation with a general statement of aspiration; declare that you
share that aspiration; and conclude that you speak for the forgotten original. The same thing
works in politics: I am the General Will. Nowadays, and in poetry, mediocrities make smaller
claims; but they make them.
And so they lose the ability to understand even as they are penning their own What is to be done?
because they do not really know what they are doing and forget completely when they try to juggle
falsehoods as well; they don’t put in the work. It is daydreaming, like wanting to be an astronaut.
An unfulfillable desire backed up by ruthlessness.
If you look at their behaviour, you see they do not understand what is needed. They do not even see
the ethical drive of, for example, Cobbing’s work.
If you look at the poetry which they claim is in the tradition of Cobbing, you will see they do not
understand.
Yes, they may get doctorates out of it; not being a fake is not an academic criterion; but they have
no inner necessity to do anything. So they fake it. They have appetite but no educable desire. Watch
young pigs at feeding time.
And so, about fifty years after Cobbing and others declared Writers Forum, we have its wayward
pupils disparaging some poetry because they don’t describe it as linguistically innovative, a term
with no particular meaning, where, before, other poetries were disregarded because they didn’t
doff their caps to Larkin or Hughes etc.
It is not just lack of understanding but, as always it seems, desire for control. In all cases, we have
people, usually mediocre in their personal achievement but perhaps lauded, telling others what
Poetry should be with the diligence of fundamentalist jobsworths; and they cannot usefully be
corrected because they know they are right—as fundamentalist jobsworths always do.
Poetic ability in their schemes is rated below Public Relations Technique. Perhaps it always was by
some. The perpetrators are ambitious for themselves seen as poets rather than for poetry.
I am most concerned with the ignorant misrepresentation of Bob Cobbing and the willful
misrepresentation of Writers Forum; but it is everywhere. As even Norman Mailer remarked: ‘The
shits have got us’.