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Bob Cobbing at the British Library From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library Chris Beckett Preamble, on the eve of National Poetry Day Alerted in contemporary style at one remove – a ‘tweet’ received by a colleague – I put Kurt Schwitters aside (‘Bob’s copy’ of Ursonate with alternate passages marked ‘Bob’ and ‘Clive’ for a Cobbing and Fencott double act),1 grabbed my camera, and went down to the British Library piazza to see what the Poetry Society had unveiled in celebration of its centenary, on the eve of National Poetry Day 2009.2 An enormous patchwork blanket, some fifty feet across and fit for a giant’s nursery, was spread over the brick forecourt. Taking my lead from another photographer, I left my shoes at the edge of the blanket and with camera in hand slowly waded into an alphabetic sea of patchwork squares, each one a brightly coloured and knitted capital letter (fig. 1). I was lost for a time in the woolly substance of the letters rising up to meet the lens, my spell of disorientation accompanied all the while by a growing sense of irony as I zigzagged back and forth following colours and shapes: the celebration on the piazza was mounted by the very Society whose national turf had once been the battleground for a bitter and protracted confrontation between Bob Cobbing’s avant-garde foot soldiers and an Arts Fig. 1. Letter detail from the Poetry Society ‘Knit A Poem’ Council rear-guard, in the soi-disant centenary project, first exhibited on the piazza of the British 3 Library, 7 October 2009. ‘poetry wars’ of Earls Court in the 1970s. I found myself chasing anticipated words across contiguous squares in several directions, as if I were traversing a misaligned crossword. Such acrostical reading would have been elementary to Cobbing, in whose extreme reading practice there were no marks – not smudge, nor smear, nor stain – that were not legible 1 Add. MS. 88909/63. The score of Ursonate (composed 1922-32) and a recording of Schwitters performing it are available at UBuWeb Sound: http://ubu.clc.wvu.edu/sound/schwitters.html 2 National Poetry Day was 8 October 2009. 3 Peter Barry, Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Cambridge, 2006), p. 1: ‘An odd thing happened in British poetry in the 1970s, but the full story has never been told. A small group of “radical” or “experimental” poets took over the Poetry Society, one of the most conservative of British cultural institutions, and for a period of six years, from 1971 to 1977, its journal, Poetry Review, was the most startling magazine in the country.’ At the time, the Poetry Society was located at 21 Earls Court Square, London. 1 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library and instantly convertible to patterns of sound. To add to the intersecting ironies, I recently discovered from Cobbing’s correspondence with the British Library that there had once been a time when its predecessor institution, the British Museum, judged Writers Forum publications exempt from legal deposit on the grounds that they could not be read.4 It was a while before I wanted to read the text I was walking on. Brought back from directionless padding and snapping by a gradual recognition of the vocabulary that surrounded me, I spotted an unmistakable co- occurrence – ‘SULLEN’ and ‘CRAFT’ – and quickly realized that I was standing upon a familiar poem by Dylan Thomas made strange by its scale (fig. 2).5 Fig. 2. Poetry Society ‘Knit A Poem’ centenary project (‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’ by Dylan Thomas) first exhibited on the piazza of the British Library, 7 October 2009. In Peter Barry’s account of the troubled history of the Poetry Society in the 1970s, the two main protagonists are Charles Osborne, Literature Director of the Arts Council, and Eric 4 Add. MS. 88909/38/2. Eleven letters (1997-98), concerning Writers Forum publications and legal deposit, including three copy letters from Cobbing and a copy letter from Betty Radin. The correspondence was prompted by a letter from the British Library requesting that Writers Forum comply with the Copyright Act 1911 by depositing a copy of each of its publications within a month of publication, to which Cobbing replied (3 April 1997) that he had sent copies in the past that had been returned, citing bpNichol, Lament (Writers Forum, 1969) as an example of a publication that had been rejected by the British Museum (the institution then responsible for legal deposit) as ‘not being an item that can be read’. Lament (‘to the memory of d.a. levy’) is, physically, a small publication ([16 pp.], 125 x 95 mm) with discontinuous and overprinted text; a copy is now held by the British Library. Today, the Library’s collection of Writers Forum publications is greatly improved, reflecting changes in collection policy, although some significant gaps remain, notably Sound Poems (1965) which included the first printing of An ABC in Sound. The British Library Sound Archive recently acquired (in 2007, from Lawrence Upton) the LP recording by Cobbing and Ernst Jandl, Sound Poems / Sprechgedichte (Writers Forum, 1965), which includes a performance by Cobbing of his sound poem sequence. For Writers Forum holdings (to 2004), see the summary checklist: http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/pdfs/writersforumpublications.pdf 5 http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/knit/ 2 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library Mottram, editor of the Society’s journal, Poetry Review: ‘Both were persuasive and charismatic figures, both temperamentally inclined to a certain intellectual arrogance and impatience’.6 Without announcement or warning to the membership at large, and without contextualizing introduction or comment in the magazine itself, Poetry Review underwent an overnight transformation of its character and poetic range, its tone and orientation, with the appearance of Mottram’s first issue in the autumn of 1971.7 The transformation may have seemed to the modernizers an overdue and inevitable moment, its provocation, such as it was, borne upon the prevailing and progressive tendency of the day – less arresting, perhaps, to cite a comparison from a sister art, than the appointment of Pierre Boulez as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1971-75) – but, to unprepared and traditional members of the Poetry Society, Mottram’s modernity without relief or context was overwhelming and shocking.8 An abstract front cover design in geometric style by concrete poet Dom Silvester Houédard signalled the change within. The sequence of poets was: Lee Harwood, Stuart Montgomery, Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, Muriel Rukeyser, Jeff Nuttall, Gilbert Sorrentino, Paul Evans, Val Warner, Roy Fisher, Bill Butler, Gael Turnbull, Richard Miller, Allen Fisher, and Houédard again. Mottram’s first issue was both a powerful declaration of editorial intent and a balanced and sensitive representation of various elements within the emergent radical forces then shaping new British poetry. Younger poets like Harwood, Allen Fisher and the late Paul Evans were published alongside more senior representatives of a native avant-garde (Roy Fisher and Gael Turnbull) and alongside three American poets (Sorrentino, McClure and Duncan) who first came to general notice in the canonic anthology edited by Donald Allen, The New American Poetry (1960), which had exerted a strong and heterogeneous influence on young British poets.9 Mottram’s first issue strategically spanned several transatlantic bases and constituted a form of polemical showing: in addition to the strong American presence, it acknowledged in the publication of Houédard a place for visual (or ‘concrete’) poetry within the contemporary range of British poetry, tacitly recognized both Gael Turnbull’s Migrant Press10 and Stuart Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press,11 and in publishing Jeff Nuttall, iconoclastic poet, painter and author of Bomb Culture12 – an inside account of post-war British counter-culture – Mottram pointed to radical native origins that Nuttall 6 Ibid., p. 3. Eric Mottram (1924-1995) taught American Literature at King’s College London. For Osborne’s brief remarks on the sustained conflict, see Charles Osborne, Giving it Away: Memoirs of an Uncivil Servant (London, 1986), pp. 193-4, 204-5. ‘It was during 1976 that a form of civil war broke out in the ranks of the Poetry Society’ (p. 204). 7 Poetry Review, 62:3 (1971). Mottram edited twenty issues (1971-77). For a complete listing of the contents of Poetry Review during his period as editor, see ‘Little Magazine Index, (4) Poetry Review’, Poetry Information, 20-21 (Winter 1979-80), pp. 142-55, which includes an afterword by Mottram, ‘Editing Poetry Review’ (pp. 154-5). 8 The shock was not limited to the jolt of new poetic forms: expletives and vulgarisms appeared on p. 223 (Harwood) and pp. 249, 251 and 252 (Nuttall). 9 Donald Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (New York, 1960). 10 David Miller and Richard Price, British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000 (London, 2006), p. 101. 11 Fulcrum Press was founded in 1965 by Stuart Montgomery. Until its demise, in 1972, it published American poets anthologized in The New American Poetry such as Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn and Gary Snyder, and British poets associated with the ‘British Poetry Revival’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Its first publication was Loquitur by Basil Bunting, at the time a neglected modernist, whose poetry Fulcrum continued to champion, publishing in quick succession, and to critical acclaim, Briggflatts (1966) and Bunting’s Collected Poems (1968).
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