Scope and Contents

Described by Ken Edwards as "The Jackson Pollack of the office duplicator," Cobbing's historical sound poems as visual images generally without words or with almost indecipherable words (visual scores), initially made on mimeograph machines are now reproduced and remade on photocopiers. This volume of collected poems includes examples of these works. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

The cover was designed by Peter Manson. The final section of this book consists of annotations to the poems. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

Girlie poems are works or poems dedicated to 'girls' whose names, at the very least, have fascinated Cobbing. The poems are constructed as permutations, palindromes, and visual scores by overprinting. As noted by Griffiths, the simpler the score, the greater the performance potential because it allows Cobbing wider improvisation. The book reprints a large number of these poems. One copy of this book has an orange color and another a blue color. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

This book includes poetry and performance notes which document several published works by Cobbing. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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David Barton's introductory essay describes Cobbing's work from 1942 to 1986 as the discovery of new sound and movement in poetry. The works reprinted in this book are mainly abstract xerox images from which Cobbing performs sound poetry. Examples of Cobbing's works in "Destruction in Art Movement," some of which are held by the Sackner Archive are also included. Cobbing denotes his mimeograph (a subclassification of "xerox art" in Archive) as duplicatorprints. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

This book includes poems of cut-ups begun in 1956. The method was to decide on the number of lines, clip out newspaper lines of the required number, and paste them up in an effective order to give an appearance of a conventional poem. This work antedates Gysin's 1959 cut-ups, usually attributed as the first to employ it. This book also includes cut-ups of earlier cut-ups, and permutations or mutations based on newspaper headlines but originating from phrases clipped from books. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Cobbing used the structure of the original book and added poems for a performance. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Bill Griffiths' introductory essay explains how Cobbing has used the duplicator, ink, stencils and over-printing to create texts of shapes and textures. They "move away from word and letter as conventional symbols...into a new semantics of shape. The works in this book date from 1970 to 1976. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

This volume contains poetry from 1976 through July 1985. In his intoductory essay, Peter finch writes that these works are modernist in the found tradition of Duchamp. Many poems are transformed pieces of lists and information reorganized by Cobbing who also performs the poems. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

This box contains reprints of 17 works, mostly published by Writers Forum, including "The Micro-Pathology of the Sign," a critical text in the form of a poem by Robert Sheppard, Processual (Almost), One, Two, Notation, 3, Spin-Off, Four, Quintet, Prosexual, Novation, Double-Octave, Spin-Off Two, Nonny-Nonny, Swarf Process, Summation and Supplement. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

In his introduction, Eric Mottram writes that "Voice Prints is for voice performance, and looking or meditating performance...[The] poem-texts or poem-images continue Bob Cobbings's experimental achievements with many uses of words, word-orders and word designs." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

Richard Truhlar writes "Cobbing uses the writer's tools (typewriter, various duplicating machines, ink, etc.) to explore the word and/or letter as hieroglyph, as phonetic symbol, and as concrete graphic interaction of language image with eye and body rhythms." This volume mainly depicts typewriter poems. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

Many of the poems in this book, which are generally abstract, were performed by Birdyak (Hugh Metcalfe & Bob Cobbing). -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This book incorporates all the material in the two publications, Sound Poems (An A B C in Sound), January 1995, and Kurrirrurriri, November 1967. It consists largely of sound poems though some are written in expressive visual format. The earliest poem in the book, 'Worm' was written in 1954 but did not achieve its final version until 1964. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents This text of this book that was first published in Kontextsound in 1977 consists of an interview of Cobbing by Mottram. Cobbing discusses how he switched from composing conventional poems to sound poems circa 1963. He also makes mention of music as it relates to sound poems and his belief that avant garde musicians appropriated material from poets not vice-versa. Bob Cobbing died at age 82 years in 2002. Robert Shepard wrote the obituary in The Guardian October 7, 2002. "Bob Cobbing, who has died aged 82, was the major exponent of concrete, visual and sound poetry in Britain. Long after its international heyday in the 1960s, he continued to produce visual texts that were also scores for performance, many of them published as booklets by his Writers' Forum press, and launched at its associated workshop, which has been meeting in private houses and rooms above pubs since 1954. His work appears in many anthologies. Born in Enfield, Cobbing was brought up within that close religious...

Scope and Contents

Cobbing notes that this piece was performed by the new vocal group "Alphonso" consisting of Bob Cobbing and Bill Millis. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.