Today marks the death of Bob Cobbing, who passed in 2002. The BC/AD of British avant-garde poetry, he’s someone whose life is narrated while having entire narratives orient around him.
The only possible contender, as far as England is concerned, is Dom Sylvester Houèdard (bpNichol has the same role in Canada; Ian Hamilton Finlay in Scotland). While Houèdard lay the groundwork for postwar concrete poetry - putting aside the fact their creative practices began separately, as shown in William Cobbing and Rosie Cooper’s monograph - Bob Cobbing’s emphasis on community-making paired with his anarchic creative output broke new ground in British poetry (and, thinking of the British Poetry Wars, broke British poetry). It’s an influence that’s felt through UK poetics to this day, including in widely known groupings such as Poem Brut. It’s unavoidable that they’re an outworking of everything Cobbing and his Writer’s Forum did.
To mark this day, I’ve linked some free shit below.
This digitised version of Cobbing’s 1985 Sockless in Sandals collects his lively lyric poems, word games, visual poems and found language, the latter of which provided the score for his famous sound poem, ‘An Alphabet of Fishes’: a recital of the names of fish in alphabetical order, complete with audience participation.
I found this interview/performance around fifteen years ago, and I’ve revisited it every six months since. It remains jarring, bracing and endlessly inspiring: a crucial document in our history. Download it. It might not be online forever.
If any evidence is needed of Cobbing’s presence in the UK’s wider avant-garde, one need only consider his collaborations with the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop. I always thought it was a shame that he favoured improv over studio experiments. This isn’t to say he didn’t still use electronics and live instrumentation, as shown in this collaboration with Hugh Metcalfe from this album.
Many more documents and recordings can be found on Ubu and Pennsound.