Designated minibooks number six. This is the first edition of the booklet. jw curry writes on the WEB: "15 Shakespeare Kaku was given a three-voice and organ live performance by Konkrete Canticle (Bob Cobbing, Paula Claire and Michael Chant) on April 23rd 1972 at a Shakespeare Birthday Week Gala Concert in Southwark Cathedral. The text presents fifteen spatially sequential typographical assemblages, I refer to them as figures, that are so partial as to be all but illegible. Two exceptions are the first and last figures, the first being a compacted version of the title page minus the word kaku, "shake" overprinted above and overprinted "spear". Although neither is cleanly present the expected closure Shakespeare can easily be made. Cobbing's final figure reprises the spear but does so to draw emphasis to "ear." The six-page text sequence begins on the recto with three horizontal figures, a double page spread with one vertical figure opposite to three more horizontal figures, a second double page spread with two horizontal figures opposite to three horizontal figures and finally a verso with three horizontal figures. Cobbing stressed his ongoing interest in this work thirty-five years later, privately circulating jwcurry's journal extracts on Bob Cobbing's 15 Shakespeare Kaku extracted from a quarterly of "haiku related material." Curry refers to that which I have called figures as not being visually mimetic "apples, landscapes or lettriste portraits of our man Will; they look like bunches of type." However these "bunches of type" for jwcurry are not throw away gestures. He means that appellation constructively. Expectation of conventional meanings, as with typestracts operated by conventions of linguistic closure, are, those first and final figures aside, made the subject of disappointment. This is the first time that Cobbing juxtaposes vertical and horizontal figures as a double-page spread in book format. So the book object, as had separate cards such as Kurrirrurriri earlier, suggests being turned in the hand; a feature of content architecture exploited in DAN that I am coming on to discuss. Cobbing's developed renewed interest in the kaku in March 1998 by producing copies of a text of teasing explicatory definitions. Kikaku Kaku, is named after Kikaku a disciple of Basho in the often alliterative and assonant Japanese short form of frozen zen haiku. He then brought many of these materials together into a large-print version as 15 Shakespeare Kaku - augmented [also held by the Sackner Archive. Bob Cobbing was working with material gleaned from over twenty variant language dictionaries around this time. Kaku has twenty-eight entries in Japanese, several of which hint at writing and drawing going in and out of each other through line-making----"an enclosure", "a stroke", "character", "the figure", "write on every other line", "scribble", "spell", "compose", "draw", "cut", "daub a picture", "scratch", "choice extracts"----for example. Other meanings bring natural shapes that bring philosophies of hermeneutics into play----"a kernel", "a stone", "crack ice"----and others still talk of societal position----"a bishop", "a palace", "promoted to a higher rank" and "good English." Such definitions augmented the earlier kaku which, made from broken and deconstructed alphabetic typography, are overprinted so that their spatialisation on the page creates a suggestion of motion within material originating in typesetting but playing both into and against the spare and sparse qualities of haiku. Deliberate generation of movement is unsurprising given that dance was a crucial aspect of Cobbing's view of poetry and he regularly invoked it, indeed he pointed to it as a convergence "between' all of his various performances, considering dance "perhaps the key to them all." This augmented edition manages to seem both didactic and elusive. Cobbing dangles a carrot to what the work might mean. At the same time he presents so many potential meanings that closures are rendered uncertain. It was a lesson that Robert Sheppard learned that Cobbing made readily available, not to "hypostasize the Poem as a closed structure." Generations of new textual versions are motivated and mobilised through frequent, live performances in front of a wide variety of audiences. Cobbing's core ongoing activity was as correspondent, "between' movements made around the machine in the transformation of texts through the printing stage and those movements of the body produced in the throes of vocal delivery. To facilitate mobility in front of an audience Cobbing's preference was for a hand-held card, rather than a book, as his sonic signal. Notation might be for the work to be sounded and listened to as much as apprehended through the eyes on a page. But notation for performance suggests more than just a sounding. The occasion itself, the environment in which it occurred and interaction with those in attendance were of importance to Cobbing. There is no sense in notation without occasion. In autumn 1994, Bob Cobbing and Lawrence Upton were asked to close The Smallest Poetry Festival, held in Robert Sheppard and Patricia Farrell's living room in a council house in Tooting. This occasion instigated the last major phase of Cobbing's creative work. Proliferating performances of variation, permutation and transformation previously most evidenced by his Processual project of ten years previously were taken a stage further into collaborative writing. The two had known each other over a period of thirty years and worked together previously, though alongside rather than directly with each other. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner. https://aspace.lib.uiowa.edu/repositories/5/archival_objects/892061 Accessed May 05, 2024.