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Home , Better Books, Bill Griffiths (poet), Bob Cobbing, British Poetry Revival, Clive Fencott, Eric Mottram

From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of at the British Library

Chris Beckett

Preamble, on the eve of National 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” 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, .

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 ) 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 Dom Silvester Houédard signalled the change within. The sequence of poets was: Lee Harwood, Stuart Montgomery, , Michael McClure, Muriel Rukeyser, , Gilbert Sorrentino, Paul Evans, Val Warner, , Bill Butler, , 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 (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 ,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. (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 , and British poets associated with the ‘’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Its first publication was Loquitur by , 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). Of the fifteen poets published in the first issue of Poetry Review to be edited by Mottram, seven were published by Fulcrum: Harwood, Montgomery (owner), Duncan, Nuttall, Evans, and Roy Fisher. 12 Jeff Nuttall, (London, 1968).

3 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library shared with Cobbing in Finchley’s ‘Arts Together’ programme of classes and meetings,13 in the Hendon experimental art club ‘Group H’ and the Hendon poetry workshop Writers Forum. The first Mottram issue of Poetry Review was not, however, entirely of a piece: there remained the jarring juxtaposition of its end papers, where officers of the Society (including William Plomer and Sir John Betjeman) were formally listed, together with affiliated poetry societies, from Cheltenham to York, promoting a national network whose parochialism stood in contrast to the vitality of alternative networks of the day, networks largely driven by Cobbing – the Association of Little Presses and Poets Conference – that did much to facilitate a rapidly developing small press publishing community and its associated poetry reading opportunities. At the back of the magazine, Mottram was obliged to print the winning poem (‘Champion Mother’) from a Poetry Society competition, a poem composed in a poetic register whose feet were entirely out of step with the poems in the body of the magazine. And yet the comments of the competition’s Adjudicator, John Cotton, did nothing to strengthen the traditionalist’s case by referring to his task as ‘a dispiriting experience’: ‘most of the competitors (there were several hundred of them) wrote in a language that bore little resemblance to anything like the English spoken and written in this century, or, in some cases, ever.’14 The division of outlook between traditionalists and modernists, between rear and advance guards, held in increasing tension for a remarkable period of some six years, co-terminous with Mottram’s tenure as editor, before the resignation en masse of fourteen members of the General Council of the Poetry Society, including Cobbing, in protest against the interventionism of the Arts Council (the Society’s funding provider) at a meeting of the General Council on 26 March 1977.15 The battle royal at the Poetry Society was, however, between Charles Osborne and Bob Cobbing, who was, as Barry observes, ‘the driving force behind the most radical aspects of the Poetry Society in these years, such as the Society’s basement print-shop, and its involvement in the quasi-trade-unionisation of the poetry scene.’16 Cobbing was first elected to the General Council of the Poetry Society in 1968, and became its Honorary Treasurer in 1970. It was in the shifting balance of Poetry Society committee membership, in points of procedure and regulation – as traditionalists slept on watch – that key battles were fought, territory won, responsibilities acquired, and the Society’s journal ‘captured’. Temperamentally, Mottram was not a man for committees. Cobbing, however, had served a long apprenticeship in the 1950s and early ‘60s in the classrooms and corridors of local authority arts provision, in Hendon and in Finchley, as a teacher and co-ordinator of community arts programmes. From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s (the exact dates are not discernible from the papers), he was Representative for the North East Region on Greater London’s Standing Committee on the Arts, and wrote an introductory booklet entitled ‘Setting Up an Arts Centre’ (1964). In an address he gave at the time at a local authority conference in Hoxton, he referred to the cohesive function of community arts: ‘the arts are not hobbies privately pursued, but public activities which have the

13 Ibid., p. 158: ‘Officially a committee ran “Arts Together” but really it was Bob Cobbing. “Arts Together” was the far-out division of Finchley Society of Arts. Finchley Society of Arts, a pretty typical collection of public virgins, divided themselves from their far-out division over the inclusion of the new youth group in the ranks. This was a bunch of kids taught by John Moate and I, finally by Cobbing as well, mostly from the Alder School, a forbidding secondary modern in East Finchley. They did possibly the finest junk sculpture I’ve ever seen, together with fantastic erotic paintings and drawings. They wrote an odd wayward kind of pop-poetry.’ Examples can be found in the booklet of poems ‘Alder Poets / Number One’ in Add. MS. 88909/28. For examples of Cobbing’s later work with schoolchildren, see Prospects (London: Writers Forum, 1986), an anthology of poems by pupils from Classes 3E and 3P, Epping Forest High School, Loughton, Essex (Visiting Poet, Bob Cobbing), a copy of which is in Add. MS. 88909/70. 14 John Cotton, ‘The Greenwood Competition’, Poetry Review, 62:3 (1971), p. 310. 15 Barry, op. cit., pp. 96-101. 16 Ibid., p. 4.

4 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library power to knit people together and give them a vision of a better life [ ...]. The artist’s job is to shake us alive.’17 During 1960-61, Cobbing had participated in a local campaign spearheaded by Finchley resident Spike Milligan to rescue from demolition an impressive, although dilapidated, Victorian property known as Brent Lodge; campaigners had proposed the development of the disused building as a community arts centre, but were unsuccessful.18 Cobbing’s entrenched position at the Poetry Society – which Nuttall considered to be ‘Bob’s finest battleground’19 – was one campaign of several. Charles Osborne, who judged one of his ‘finest achievements in the 1970s’ to be his Literature Department’s continuous financial support of Ian Hamilton’s The New Review (‘a new literary magazine of national stature’), remembered the Poetry Society’s Executive Council on which Cobbing served as ‘a strange assemblage’ of ‘non-talents and eccentrics’ whose ‘level of debate was subterranean’.20 Another and more recent view of the period is represented by Andrew Motion’s revisionist Foreword to Peter Barry’s history of the ‘poetry wars’, in which Motion offers a taming and reductively-nostalgic characterization of Mottram’s period of tenure as the Society’s ‘adventurous/rancorous years’, when he ‘was fighting a necessary fight: to rescue sidelined traditions from obscurity, and to give them a more secure place in the sun’.21 Motion’s question- begging measure of ‘Mottram’s success’ is the pluralist assertion of a ‘comparatively well- tempered acceptance that we live in a culture of poetries.’22 Here, ‘acceptance’ is doubly modified and distanced: ‘well-tempered’ suggests reasonableness and harmony, and stands – ‘comparatively’ – in enlightened contrast to the ill-tempered rancour of former Poetry Society years. Motion was himself a subsequent editor of Poetry Review (1981-83), and in 1982, with Blake Morrison, published The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, a book of national representative ambition that, notwithstanding the breadth of its title, confined the scope of its selection to a deliberately narrow range, with Seamus Heaney at its head, and excluded all the poets of Mottram’s revivalist programme.23 The Introduction to the anthology referred

17 Unpublished [1964], in autograph manuscript (Add. MS. 88909/33). See, in the same file, ‘Report of A Conference of Local Authorities and Local Arts Councils held at Hoxton Hall, Shoreditch, Saturday, June 27, 1964’ in which Cobbing’s address is summarized. Jeff Nuttall attended the same meeting, commenting that ‘he agreed with Mr Cobbing, but thought he had not gone far enough’ (p. 11). The file also contains the booklet ‘Setting Up an Arts Centre’. 18 Restoration was judged uneconomic and the building was condemned. See the notebook of newspaper cuttings Add. MS. 88909/32 (Finchley Society of Arts) for a number of items relating to the matter. In addition to Milligan (supported by Peter Sellers, Eric Sykes and other popular entertainers), another high profile Brent Lodge campaigner was John Betjeman. Margaret Thatcher, Conservative MP for Finchley, commented that ‘it all comes down to pounds shillings and pence’ (newspaper cutting dated 20 January, 1961). 19 Quoted in Doreen King, Poetology of Bob Cobbing (Shrewsbury, 2003), p. 55. Source not given. 20 Osborne, op. cit., pp. 184 and 204. Cobbing was ‘an amiable but […] talentless “sound poet”’ (p. 193). 21 Andrew Motion, Foreword to Barry, op. cit., pp. xi, xii. 22 Motion, Foreword, Barry, op. cit., p. xii. Cf. cris cheek: ‘Out at the words market, a sufficiently wide range of aspirational tastes is being catered for, such is the myth of choice, to result in the seeming absorption of “all”, by the artifices of a capitalist society obsessed with controlled diversity as an engine of its survival.’ cheek, ‘Domestic Ambient Noise/Moise’, in Riding the Medidian, vol. 2, issue 1: http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/cheek/damntheory.html 23 ‘These four important figures dominated the publication and reception of large-press poetry in the UK in the 1980s: Motion was editor of Poetry Review, from 1981 to 1983, and then poetry editor and editorial director at London publishers Chatto & Windus, from 1983 to 1989; Morrison worked for the Times Literary Supplement between 1978 and 1981 as poetry and fiction editor and was then literary editor for both The Observer and the Independent on Sunday; [Craig] Raine was books editor for New Review, from 1977 to 1978, editor of the literary magazine Quarto, from 1979 to 1980, and poetry editor at the New Statesman, in 1981, and then became poetry editor at the London publishers Faber and Faber, from 1981 to 1991; [Christopher] Reid, finally, was Raine’s successor as poetry editor at Faber, performing the role from 1991 to 1999. Hence, to get on as a poet in Britain during that period you had to please at least one of them.’ Barry, op. cit., pp. 181-2.

5 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library combatively and dismissively to the period defined by Mottram (1960-75)24 – and implicitly to Mottram’s editorship of Poetry Review – as a ‘a spell of lethargy’.25 In stressing the newness of their project, and in suggesting that their anthology required ‘a reformation of poetic taste’ to be properly appreciated, Motion and Blake dressed their proposal of a ‘shift of sensibility’ in clothes borrowed from a cause more radical than their selection suggested.26 Motion’s Foreword to Barry’s history is matched by the smooth succession of editors currently listed on the Poetry Society’s website, which highlights not Mottram but Muriel Spark as the editor (1947-49) who first disturbed a quiet tradition of unremarkable publication.27 Bemused, I left the Society’s colourful centennial blanket and returned inside, to another narrative, to Schwitters and to , to Bob and Clive:

dll rrrrrr beeeee bö, dll rrrrrr beeeee bö fümms bö, rrrrrr beeeee bö fümms bö wö, beeeee bö fümms bö wö tää, bö fümms bö wö tää zää, fümms bö wö tää zää Uu:28

24 Eric Mottram, ‘The British Poetry Revival, 1960-75’, in Robert Hampson and Peter Barry (eds.), New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible (Manchester, 1993), pp. 15-50. 25 Introduction to Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison (eds.), The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 11: ‘There are points in literary history when decisive shifts of sensibility occur [...]. Though its long-term consequence necessarily remains unclear, such a shift of sensibility has taken place very recently in British poetry. It follows a stretch, occupying much of the 1960s and 70s, when very little – in England at any rate – seemed to be , when achievements in British poetry were overshadowed by those in drama and fiction, and when, despite the presence of strong individual writers, there was a lack of overall shape and direction. Now, after a spell of lethargy, British poetry is once again undergoing a transition: a body of work has been created which demands, for its appreciation, a reformation of poetic taste.’ 26 ‘Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison were among the first to call these poets Postmodern [...]. Nevertheless it is a very different, much less radical Postmodernism than that in fiction or the visual arts, and often looks less modern than the Modernists.’ Peter Middleton, ‘Poetry After 1970’, in Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 769-70. 27 The suggestion of unremarkableness is made by Fiona Sampson, the present Editor of Poetry Review: ‘Browsing green-bound volumes for the period to 1947 in the Society’s offices, it’s hard to find a poet you’ve heard of, or a critique inspiring full confidence’: http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/publications/review/. For Spark’s editorship of Poetry Review, see Martin Stannard, Muriel Spark: The Biography (London, 2009), pp 78-82, and Derek Stanford, Inside the Forties: Literary Memoirs 1937-1957 (London, 1977), pp. 147-58 (‘A Girl of Slender Means’). 28 From the Introduction section, Kurt Schwitters, Ursonate (Add. MS. 88909/63). The work is constructed as a (mock) classical four-movement sonata. For a flyer listing a performance of Ursonate by Cobbing and Fencott (18 November 1985) at the London Musicians Collective, 42 Gloucester Avenue, Camden, see Add. MS. 88909/140.

6 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library

From Wesley Guild to bearded secretary

The papers of Bob Cobbing (1920-2002)29 at the British Library comprise 212 files.30 They document the course of Cobbing’s extensive career, from an early interest in poetry and voice, fostered at in the mid-1930s, to the remarkable sustained late work produced more than fifty years later, jointly with Lawrence Upton, Domestic Ambient Noise, and published by Writers Forum in 300 parts (1994-2000). Amongst Cobbing’s other major works are: ABC in Sound (1965), Five Vowels (1974), Processual (1982-85), glossolalie un hallali (1997), and Third ABC in Sound (2000). It must be said at the outset that researchers who hope to find in the papers an orderly and complete set of master texts of Cobbing’s poetry, sprinkled generously with draft material, will be disappointed. With some exceptions (such as The Tom Poems, first drafted in 1983, for Tom Leonard),31 the paper record of Cobbing’s poetry is, although a rich assemblage, a relatively unstructured collection of surviving examples, samplings of surplus printings, and copies of copies made for various unidentified purposes (some enlarged as performance texts or prompts). The pace and rhythm of Cobbing’s work-flow, which commonly proceeded from creation to self-publication in fairly quick succession, tends to preclude the discovery of substantial unpublished material: for Cobbing, experimentation was always more a spur to publication than a reason not to publish. It is unfortunate, however, that there is an absence of ordered groupings, draft workings, and considered trial printings, that would have provided insight into working methods and the processes through which visual ideas were developed and deployed. Thus, the complete record of Cobbing’s poetry texts remains his sequence of Writers Forum publications, the majority of which have now been acquired by the British Library. It should also be noted that considerable, and well-intentioned, weeding and sorting was undertaken prior to the archive being received, with the result that original order (or original disorder) has been very largely lost. These caveats to one side, however, the paper archive is certainly a splendid treasure store. Cobbing was not only the most important figure in the development of British in the second half of the twentieth century; he occupied a focal position in the various alternative information and distribution networks subscribed to by an otherwise disparate body of poets, not all of whom fell within the rallying wave of Mottram’s British Poetry Revival banner, not least the generation of London-based poets who were writing in the 1980s and 1990s when Cobbing continued to be active and influential.

29 For outlines of Cobbing’s life and work, see the principal obituaries: Nicholas Johnson, The Independent (2 October 2002); Robert Sheppard, (7 October 2002); and, unattributed, The Times (7 November 2002). Additional biographical information is given in a series of interviews that Cobbing gave shortly before he died, in Doreen King, Poetology of Bob Cobbing (Shrewsbury, 2003). For a more detailed introduction to Cobbing’s work, see Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950-2000 (Liverpool, 2005), pp. 214-32. Bob Cobbing, Changing Forms in English Visual Poetry – The Influence of Tools and Machines (London: Writers Forum, 1987) provides a useful visual overview of Cobbing’s graphic work set in context. I am grateful to Jennifer Cobbing for permission to publish in this article images of Bob Cobbing’s work from the archive. 30 Add. MS. 88909 (http://searcharchives.bl.uk/). The collection is divided into seven sections: Personal Material; Hendon and Finchley; Literary Correspondence; Works; Writers Forum, Association of Little Presses and New River Project; Bob Cobbing and his Contemporaries; Papers Concerning the Poetry Society and Poets Conference. The papers were acquired from Jennifer Cobbing in 2005. As a separate acquisition, the British Library Sound Archive received from Jennifer Cobbing in excess of 300 open-reel tape recordings, many of which have been catalogued and are also available to researchers. A compact disc drawn from this audio material was published in the British Library’s series in May 2009 (ISBN 9780712305945); it contains recordings made between 1965 and 1973. Recordings of Cobbing performing his work are also available at UBuWeb Sound: http://ubu.clc.wvu.edu/sound/cobbing.html 31 Add. MS. 88909/55.

7 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library

Accordingly, the archive offers researchers a bi-generational resource of some breadth and depth – from, indicatively, Dom Silvester Houédard to Ralph Hawkins, or from Ian Hamilton Finlay to Robert Sheppard – and supplies a point of access to a rich and coherent collection of documents essential to any comprehensive assessment of the full range of British poetry over a fifty-year period. Equally importantly, it records something of the way in which a loosely-affiliated body of poets at the margins of mainstream visibility – particularly the case in the century’s latter decades – went about their collective business. Much of that poetry can still only be found in obscure (and increasingly fragile) small press publications that owed a good deal of their initial reception and circulation to Cobbing’s publishing and promotional endeavours. The archive includes materials derived from the activities of his publishing imprint Writers Forum (which began life in 1952 as the Hendon Writers’ Circle, and issued its first publication in 1963)32 and from the Association of Little Presses (ALP), the umbrella organization Cobbing founded with Stuart Montgomery in 1966 as a successful strategy to attract Arts Council funding to the small press sector. A notable inclusion in respect of ALP is a series of seven strongly-worded letters (1969) from Scottish concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay to Cobbing (wearing an ALP hat of arbitration), which express in forthright terms Finlay’s dispute with Montgomery concerning the (re-) publication of The Dancers Inherit the Party by Fulcrum Press in 1969.33 Cobbing’s Poetry Society and Poets Conference papers – the only substantial documentary source that Peter Barry had been unable to consult in researching his history of the Poetry Society conflict34 – can be considered together in context. Poets Conference was the forum in which the radical wing discussed (in their ‘subterranean’ fashion, as Osborne had it) objectives and strategy.35 The papers include material relating to Poetry Review, the appointments of Mottram and his successor as editors, and include a regrettable example of scatological material (the existence of which had been doubted in some quarters) at Mottram’s expense. Notwithstanding Cobbing’s enduring and catalytic London presence, Cobbing’s work was more commonly fêted abroad than at home, in , in Toronto, and across Europe, at international festivals and centres of activity. The substantial correspondence files – in the main, letters (and manuscripts) received – testify to the international scope of Cobbing’s reputation and influence, and the archive provides an opportunity for researchers to assess this wider circle of contact. Cobbing’s unremitting schedule of performances, at home and overseas, can be tracked by consulting a combination of letters, brief pocket diary entries and an extensive run of flyers and programmes that span, in a colourful parade, the 1960s to the end of the century. On more than one occasion Cobbing said that his interest in the sound of poetry was first aroused in his sixth-form English lessons at Enfield Grammar School: ‘Dr Marshall, who […]

32 The first Writers Forum publication was a joint collection of poems by Keith Musgrove and Jeff Nuttall, The Limbless Virtuoso (1963). In the same year, Writers Forum published a joint collection of poems by Cobbing and John Rowan, The Massacre of the Innocents (Writers Forum, 1963). 33 Finlay objected to Fulcrum Press designating The Dancers Inherit the Party as a first edition (an earlier edition, with some difference in contents, had been published by Migrant Press in 1960 and 1962). His first letter (17 July 1969) expresses the wish that Fulcrum Press be expelled from ALP forthwith and gives notice that he will be taking legal action against Montgomery and Fulcrum Press. The remaining letters detail (and repeat) his grievances, and express his anger and frustration at Cobbing’s alleged inaction about the matter. See Add. MS. 88909/92. 34 Barry, op. cit., p. 4: ‘Cobbing’s recent death (in 2002) meant that his papers had not yet become available while this book was being written, but when they are, they will be a principal resource for the history of that strand of British experimental writing’. 35 For a contemporary account, see the report ‘Poets Conference’, , 16/17 ([1973]), pp. 196-200, which includes a photograph (p. 197) of Cobbing and George Macbeth entering the offices of the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street to present Conference views about the role of the Poet Laureate.

8 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library read some lovely Elizabethan poetry to us […] was also very keen on modern poetry and among other things he read us Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo” – “Fat black bucks in a wine- barrel room, barrel house kings, with feet unstable […] sagged and reeled and pounded on the table […] Boom, Boom, BOOM!” That is where my interest in sound poetry came from.’36 Cobbing was engaged, then, as a young man, by poetry with strongly accented rhythms and refrains, by the play of pattern and cadence, and by the emotional impact of the human voice in song and ballad. Lindsay published ‘The Congo’ with expression notes at the right margin to indicate how particular passages were to be read aloud. Against the lines Cobbing quoted from memory (some sixty years later), Lindsay directs the reader to adopt ‘A deep rolling bass’.37 The voice-prompts that run throughout ‘The Congo’ supply a range of guidance: sometimes a prompt suggests rhythm and pace (‘With growing speed and sharply-marked dance-rhythm’), sometimes pitch (‘Rather shrill and high’), sometimes amplitude (‘Dying down into a penetrating, terrified whisper’), sometimes tone and emotional register (‘Begin with terror and power, end with joy’), and sometimes racial accent (‘With a touch of negro dialect’). Occasionally, the guidance is impressionistic (‘Like the wind in the chimney’), and more than once the performer of the poem is exhorted to sing (‘Sung to the tune of “Hark ten thousand harps and voices”’).38 Lindsay’s voice-prompts call to mind Cobbing’s notes to his first sound poem sequence, ABC in Sound (1965): ‘H’ should be ‘monotonously rhythmical’; ‘I’ should be ‘Needle sharp’; and ‘Z’ should be ‘conversational but metrical’.39 Lawrence Upton has recalled how Cobbing had a habit of breaking into ‘exuberant’ and ‘unannounced renditions’ of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ and ‘You Are Old, Father William’; ‘he also favoured Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads, especially “Boots” and “Danny Deever”, and Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo”.’40 Confirmation of Cobbing’s early fascination with the sound of poetry – not yet ‘sound poetry’ – can be found in four notebooks of copied poems that he kept at the time (in the middle to late 1930s).41 They contain, in addition to Vachel Lindsay (represented by ‘The Daniel Jazz’), many other poems and songs in which sound – particularly rhythmic interest – is paramount. They include: ‘Night Mail’ by W. H. Auden, ‘Polka’ (from Façade) by Edith Sitwell, the American folk song ‘Casey Jones’, ‘A Ballad of John Silver’ by John Masefield, the hypnotic melancholy of ‘Tarantella’ by Hilaire Belloc, and lines from T. S. Eliot’s dramatic ‘Fragment of an Agon’ that recall in their syncopation and patterning the worlds of both music hall and jazz. ‘I gotta use words when I talk to you’,42 said Sweeney, and a young Cobbing carefully copied down the rhythmic shuffle of Eliot’s resonant truism. Eliot incorporated into his poetry a fundamental struggle with language as an imperfect and fallen resource, such that the struggle itself became a recurrent theme – ‘the intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings’43 – but Cobbing’s orientation towards performance, and a certain pre-lapsarian zeal, led him to adopt another approach. Stepping back to begin, his work

36 W. Mark Sutherland, ‘Interview with Bob Cobbing’, Queen Street Quarterly, 5:3 (2001), pp. 50-62, p. 50. Cobbing referred to the same early influence when he was interviewed, in 1995, by Wolfgang Görtschacher, Contemporary Views on the Little Magazine Scene (Salzburg, 2000), p. 301. 37 Vachel Lindsay, ‘The Congo’, Collected Poems (New York, 1925), p. 178. For other poems that include voice- prompts, see ‘In Praise of Johnny Appleseed’ (pp. 82-90), ‘The Santa-Fé Trail’ (pp. 152-8), ‘The Firemen’s Ball’ (pp. 319-26), and ‘I Heard Immanuel Singing’ (pp. 369-72). 38 Ibid., pp. 178-84. 39 ABC in Sound, 5th edn (Writers Forum, March 1994), referred to by Cobbing as ‘the definitive edition’. 40 Lawrence Upton, ‘Bob Cobbing: and the book as medium; designs for poetry’, Readings webjournal (Birkbeck, University of London), issue 4 (last modified 4 March 2009), endnote 20: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/readings/issues/issue4/upton_on_cobbing. 41 Add. MS. 88909/3. 42 ‘Fragment of an Agon’, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London, 1969), p. 125. 43 ‘East Coker’, ibid., p. 179.

9 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library revisited Dada’s Cabaret Voltaire and returned repeatedly to the aesthetic ground zero of Futurism that preceded the Cabaret, where the noise of the modern world – its music of concrete sounds simultaneously and cacophonously sounded – was welcomed as a fundamental component of composition.44 Cobbing broke language down into its constituent phonemes and graphic shapes. With the aid of a Gestetner ink duplicator, acquired in 1942, and, later, a Canon photocopier, acquired in 1984 (which opened his work to scalar variation), he graphically deformed text to create indicative scores for voice, and frequently managed without words or letters altogether. He over-printed words, obscured and smudged them, enlarged, rotated and truncated letters, dissolved them into a grainy mist, and then freely – exuberantly – voiced the visual noise of their erasure. Over time, Cobbing’s work developed as a single extensive art-practice which integrated design, print and oral performance, and presaged the flourishing practice today of poetry as an intermedial, transmedial and . A character reference for Cobbing supplied in 1943 by the Rev. Stanley Dixon, Chairman of the British United Aid to China Fund, sketches the social and religious environment (Methodism, the Wesley Guild) of Cobbing’s early adult years.45 Cobbing was a conscientious objector. Initially assigned to clerical work in a hospital near Enfield, he was subsequently transferred to undertake agricultural work on farms in Buckinghamshire and in Wiltshire, where the task of bagging-up lime affected his health. In 1943, he applied for alternative duties as an assistant teacher. The Rev. Dixon then wrote: ‘He has an unusually alert and active mind and has a deep interest both in people & in events. He is at present studying by correspondence for his Intermediate Arts & is displaying his accustomed industry & resolution. Mr Cobbing has a flair for Youth work & has given considerable help at the Enfield Youth Centre (Enfield Chase), where his influence has ever been wholesome & vigorous on the side of the angels. He has shown interest in Dramatics, in Church Guild activities, in Sunday School teaching & in international affairs.’46 Whilst there would be those who would take a contrary view about the wholesomeness of Cobbing’s influence, and, indeed, his angelic alignment – Charles Osborne, for one, and the Headmaster of Alder School, East Finchley, where Cobbing and Nuttall were fellow teachers, for another – the qualities of leadership and resolve that the Rev. Dixon detected in a youthful Cobbing, the gregarious nature coupled with a strong and moral sense of community, were perceptive observations. Cobbing spent four years as an unqualified assistant teacher at Swindon High School, before being admitted to Bognor Training College under the Emergency Training Scheme in January 1948, where he trained to be an art teacher. In Swindon, Cobbing found a lively local arts scene. ‘Swindon had the first arts centre in the country and there was film going on, and music and painting and poetry, and I was interested in all of them’.47 He was a member of Swindon’s Poetry Circle, gave a talk on Eliot at the Public Library (10 January 1947), and published a short article on Eliot and the emergence of modern verse drama in a local arts journal (Spotlight), concluding that ‘amateur companies can usefully play their part in creating a public for verse plays’.48 At

44 Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noise (1913), reprinted as a pamphlet by Something Else Press (New York, 1967): ‘We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise- sounds’ (p. 6). Russolo can be read (in an alternative translation) in the context of other Futurist manifestos in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (London, 2009), pp. 74-88. 45 For a record of Cobbing’s Guild Meetings, see the two notebooks in Add. MS. 88909/2. 46 6 August 1943. In Add. MS. 88909/6. 47 Cobbing interviewed by Görtschacher, op. cit., p. 305. 48 Add. MS. 88909/70. Robt. W Cobbing, ‘The Poet and the ’, Spotlight (The Journal of the Swindon and District Theatre Guild), vol. 1:2 (November 1947), p. 27. For the programme of meetings and talks at Swindon Public Library, see Add. MS. 88909/6.

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Bognor, the teacher training programme ranged across the arts. The archive includes Cobbing’s course study, ‘The Purpose of Art’ (1949), neatly presented in his best examination hand. The argument of the essay, which draws from the art criticism of Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Herbert Read (and makes no reference to Dada or to Futurism), emphasizes the expressive function of form: ‘The approach to art must be through the feelings and the effect of form must be allowed to have full sway on our emotions not on our minds.’49 Two further statements from it are striking, inasmuch as they privilege both performance and emotional response: ‘Because poetry depends for its emotional effect on sound more than on meaning, a poem is not a work of art until it is heard.’ The second statement suggests, in its presentation of the intellect as a faculty to be quietened or circumvented, something of the pre-literate appeal of sound poetry as unmediated experience, as Cobbing would later come to conceive it: ‘the insistent, musical, rhythmic sound of poetry acts as a soporific to the intellect, and allows the poem to have its full effect on the emotions.’50 In 1950, Cobbing moved to Hendon. He spent a busy decade, by day, as an unconventional school teacher whose teaching style was not always in accord with the expectations of his headmasters,51 and by evening as the instigator and mainstay of a suite of arts clubs and societies, at Hendon Technical College and Hendon Library. Their range reflected Cobbing’s interests and provided opportunities to explore contemporary expression with others. In contrast to Swindon, Hendon’s organized arts activities seemed to Cobbing to be ‘pretty dull’. He approached the local library and ‘started two painting groups, one for professional painters and one for amateurs, one group for film, a jazz group, a poetry group, a theatre group. The whole thing took off; it kept me occupied. I think we had something going on every night of the week.’52 There are hand-coloured posters in the archive for several art house films, including The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928), Death of a Cyclist (Bardem, 1955), Strike (Eisenstein, 1925; (fig. 3)), and the short film Guernica (Resnais, 1950).53 Cobbing was also the driving force behind Hendon Arts Theatre (HAT), which, in the mid- to late-1950s, boldly tackled everything from Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie) to Christopher Fry (The Lady’s Not For Burning), and from Jean Anouilh (Antigone) to John Dryden (Amphitryon). In 1955, Cobbing played the lead part in Dryden’s drama and generally had a hand in most aspects of HAT productions, including set creation. Once again, he prepared hand-coloured posters. One double bill at Hendon Technical College (3 May 1958) combined Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes with the first British performance, as the programme announces, of William Saroyan’s Sweeney in the Trees (fig. 4).

49 Add. MS. 88909/5 (sheet numbered 249). 50 Add. MS. 88909/5 (sheets numbered 289 and 290). The study includes a large number of colour reproductions of twentieth-century paintings. Several small weaving samples produced during the course are also held (Add. MS. 88909/4). 51 For examples of pedagogical differences, see material in Add. MS. 88909/6, which includes Reports by H. M. Inspectors on Barnfield and Alder Secondary Modern Schools (1956 and 1963), and a copy of booklet of poetry produced by Cobbing’s pupils, ‘Barnfield Poems 1959-1960’. 52 Cobbing interviewed by Görtschacher, op. cit., p. 305. 53 For examples of the posters, and for detailed programme notes, see Add. MS. 88909/18. Interest in contemporary film continued into the 1960s. The same file includes British Film Institute notes for a programme of short films under the title ‘Beat, Square, Cool’ (12 July – 14 August, 1960), which included Pull My Daisy (screenplay and narration by ); also in this file, a letter from Kenneth Anger (11 June 1965) to the ‘Cinema 65’ Film Club commenting that the BFI’s print (1954) of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is unsatisfactory and should not be shown. (Anger prepared a revised version in 1966.)

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Fig. 3. Hendon Film Society poster for Strike (Eisenstein), 8 October [1958]. Add. MS. 88909/18.

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Fig. 4. Hendon Arts Theatre poster for Sweeney Agonistes (T. S. Eliot) and Sweeney in the Trees (William Saroyan), 3 May [1958]. Add. MS. 88909/24.

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In the entrance hall, there was an exhibition of paintings by Group H; during the interval, live jazz from the Parkside Jazzmen.54 The evening’s triple offering of art, theatre and jazz typified the integrated contemporary purpose of Cobbing’s Hendon Arts Together, and it can be surmised that it was in such theatrical productions that Cobbing’s voice grew in range, presence and projection, before he began to deploy his vocal resources as a performance poet (fig. 5).

Fig. 5. A swordsman restrained: Cobbing treading the boards in an unidentified Hendon Arts Theatre production (late 1950s). Add. MS. 88909/24.

Poetry events at this time were primarily poetry recitals. Local newspapers reported that on Saturday 21 January 1961, at a recital at North Finchley Library, John Rowan’s voice gave out at the climax of his reading of ’s , but a handy tape recording of Ginsberg himself reading came to the rescue.55 On the same evening, Cobbing read ‘five short poems of his own composition’ and ‘did full justice’ to Dan Propper’s apocalyptic ‘Fable of the Final Hour’ and ’s ‘Impeachment of President Eisenhower’ (fig. 6).

54 For theatre programmes and posters, see Add. MS. 88909/24. 55 For Rowan’s anecdotal account of the occasion, see the short film compiled by Steve Willey, The Sound of Writers Forum (2010), available at: http://www.openned.com/recordingsvideo/2010/3/23/the-sound-of- writers-forum.html

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Fig. 6. ‘The “Beat” Comes to Finchley’ (Finchley Press, 27 January 1961). From a notebook containing local newspaper cuttings. Add. MS. 88909/32.

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Two months later at the Library, there was another ‘recital of modern poetry and prose, some with jazz accompaniment’: John Rowan read Kenneth Patchen, Jack Kerouac and ; Cobbing (‘one of the bearded secretaries of Finchley Society of Arts’) read and Kenneth Koch; Pete Brown, ‘fresh from readings in Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle’, read ; and Anselm Hollo, the Finnish poet and translator then resident in London and a frequent visitor to Writers Forum meetings, ‘contributed the high spot of the evening, a poem in pure sound by Kurt Schwitters entitled “Superbirdsong”‘ (fig. 7).56

Fig. 7. ‘Writers Forum’ (Finchley Press, 24 March 1961): ‘Anselm Hollo contributed the high spot of the evening, a poem in pure sound by Kurt Schwitters entitled ‘Superbirdsong’. Although short, and of course completely incomprehensible (since there was no meaning in it to comprehend) this made an impact not outdone by any of the more highly organized pieces read during the evening’. From a notebook containing local newspaper cuttings. Add. MS. 88909/32.

56 See the notebook of cuttings Add. MS. 88909/32 for reports from the Finchley Press and the Hendon and Finchley Times. For the text of Dan Propper, ‘Fable of the Final Hour’ (1958), see: http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/thirdpage/finalhour.html

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Looking for a language: from Hendon to

A notebook entry made in 1964, in the form of a summary table (fig. 8), tallies Cobbing’s poems from a ten-year period, listing them according to compositional procedure. He used the term ‘experimental’ to categorize the few visual or concrete poems he had by then produced:

Expl Normal Cut-up Cut-up+ Re-arrangement

1954 2 2

1955

1956 6 4 10

1957 4 1 5

1958 1 2 3 6

1959 4 10 1 15

1960 1 11 3 5 20

1961 6 3 1 10

1962 New Exp 5 3 2 12

2

1963 1 1 Sound Poems 1 3 6

1964 2 1 26 1 30

Fig. 8. Transcribed notebook entry (inside back cover): tally of poems written 1954-1964. Add. MS. 88909/46.

The table can be correlated with the earliest poems of Cobbing that have survived. In 1954, he wrote ‘Meditation on Worms’ and ‘Snow’. Both appear, as fair hand copies, in the same notebook, each taking the form of four columns of vocabulary that constellate their ostensible subject (fig. 9). We can think of the two poems as companion vocabulary exercises exploring the sounds of semantic clusters: ‘Meditation on WORMS’ (a theme common to Christian theology and traditional Buddhist meditation) is an earth poem concerned with decay and with discovery (‘root out’ and ‘grub up’); ‘Snow’ is a poem of the air, contrasting the stillness of ‘gelid’ cold with snow’s aerial dance, given in a string of present participles (‘fluttering’ and ‘dandling’). But snow is also identified as an accumulative covering, a ‘death-white’ occlusion

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Fig. 9. Cobbing, ‘Two Experiments’: ‘Meditation on WORMS’ and ‘Snow’ (1954). Inside front cover of a notebook of poems. Add. MS. 88909/46.

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‘deadening’ and ‘entombing’ – resulting in stasis and the ‘muffling’ of sound: ‘can’t go’ and ‘end here’.57 The two grid-like poems anticipate the incantational forms of later, more- developed work, such as Chamber Music (1967), for six or twelve voices (fig. 10).

Fig. 10. Detail, with Cobbing’s annotations, from his copy of Chamber Music (1967), printed as a single folded sheet. Add. MS. 88909/70.

At the year 1964, Cobbing’s notebook table is modified to accommodate a new category (‘Sound Poems’), incorporating the breakthrough in his poetry represented by the twenty-six alphabetical parts of ABC in Sound, in which more strictly-defined and multilingual word lists were deployed. Most of the ‘cut-up’ poems listed in the table received their first publication much later, in Cygnet Ring (1977), the first volume of Cobbing’s collected poems.58 In the Introduction to Cygnet Ring, Cobbing cited as his predecessor one of the founding members of Dada, , who famously created poems by drawing words serendipitously from a bag. By placing Tzara at the head of his collected poems, Cobbing signalled that the origins of his verbal experimentation – conducted at a time when he considered himself to be more practising artist than poet – were not drawn from Beat literature, even though in the late 1950s it was the American pull of Beat poetry and its associated jazz culture that was generally inspirational, as the recital programmes at North Finchley Library suggest. Cobbing’s Introduction reminds the reader that Brion Gysin and William Burroughs did not arrive at their aleatory cut-up procedures until 1959, by which time, as the notebook table testifies, Cobbing had written

57 ‘In 1954 [Cobbing] started using words in his paintings, and began thinking of his work as poetry and himself as a poet. It was in 1954 that he wrote “Worm,” which he referred to once, in a conversation we had, as “my first verbal poem of any consequence,”‘. Paul Dutton, ‘Viewed from His Workroom Floor: A Personal Perspective on Bob Cobbing (1920-2002)’, Open Letter, 11th Series, no. 7 (2003). Available at: http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/DTTN-COB.HTM. Cobbing reads ‘Worm’ on the British Library Spoken Word CD (Track 3). 58 Cygnet Ring: Collected Poems Volume One (London: Tapocketa Press, 1977).

19 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library twenty-one poems in this vein.59 He eschewed the ironic lyric voice favoured by English Movement poets of the day: while was awkwardly removing his bicycle-clips, Cobbing was busy with scissors, cutting and pasting newspaper text, constructing experimental poems by procedure and chance, and reading his results at Writers Forum meetings to a mixed response. Language was shuffled and re-assembled. ‘Make Perhaps This Out Sense Of Can You’ is the self-referential title of one headline-derived poem in which a succession of variant lines offer degrees of syntactical sense and nonsense.60 The range of verbal experiments collected in Cygnet Ring confront language with a measure of seeming puzzlement, and perhaps with varying degrees of impact and success; the experiments call to mind Robert Creeley’s initial reaction to ’s early poems, that he was looking for a language.61 None of Cobbing’s experiments were revised when he collected them. The opening stanza of the poem ‘Burroughs Welcome’ (dated ‘September 1962’ and registering William Burroughs’s London sojourn)62 offers an uncertain pastiche sequencing traditional salutation, an over-familiar shard from The Waste Land, and a line offering Oulipo-style dropped letters: ‘Burroughs welcome! / these fragments I have shored / against my ruin / which hems orang out’. Other poems in Cygnet Ring, such as ‘The Young Hedgehog’ (written, as Cobbing’s Introduction informs us, in response to a subject set for a Writers Forum meeting) cannot be considered experimental at all, although the poem ends with characteristic delight in non-verbal sound: ‘Fed on the bottle, / It thanks us / With the sonorous / Pianissimo / Of passionate / Squeaks’. The play of sense and sound in these enjambed lines – which modulate their semantic surprise between ‘s’ and ‘p’ sounds, setting sonority against quietness, and setting the gravitas of passion against the excited pitch of a grateful squeak – provides the reader with traditional poetic pleasures even as the sound of the hedgehog seems to point towards the squeaks, shrieks and hisses of Cobbing’s subsequent poetry of sound.63 As well as collecting Cobbing’s unpublished verbal experiments, Cygnet Ring re-published several examples of his early visual poetry, presenting the beginnings of a graphic approach to the incitement of vocal performance. The most striking example is the brief chant-like poem beginning ‘Are your children safe in the sea?’ A linear version of the poem, to use Cobbing’s terminology, was first published in Massacre of the Innocents (1963) under a title that reflected its newspaper source, ‘a line from the observer’:

Are your children safe in the sea? Are your children safely in the sea? Are your children safe? In the sea Are your children. Safe in the sea Are your children. Safe? In the sea?64

59 Writing in the third person, Cobbing noted: ‘Bob Cobbing’s cut-ups were begun in March, 1956, and this, the first volume of his collected poems prints all that were done. 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. Success was to use all the lines, failure to have one or more left over which did not fit in’. Although Cobbing’s purpose is to link his work directly to Tzara, rather than indirectly to him through Burroughs, he refers to Tzara by splicing two quotations from Burroughs and Gysin, taken conveniently from Eric Mottram, William Burroughs: Algebra of Need (London, 1977), pp. 37, 38. 60 Cobbing, Cygnet Ring (1977), without pagination. The words derive from a headline in the Kilburn Times. 61 Olson to Creeley (21 April 1950), reporting Creeley’s remarks to Vincent Ferrini. George F. Butterick (ed.), Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence Volume 1 (Santa Barbara, 1980), p. 19. 62 Burroughs resided in London from 1960 to 1973, during which period he also spent time in Tangiers and New York. Graham Caveney, The Priest, They Called Him: The Life and Legacy of William S Burroughs (London, 1997), pp. 107ff. 63 Cobbing, Shrieks & Hisses: Collected Poems Volume Sixteen (Buckfastleigh, 1999). 64 Cobbing and John Rowan, op. cit. (without pagination).

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In January 1965, ‘visual versions’ of the poem were made, including the versions on front and back covers of Cygnet Ring, and the following year the poem was separately treated as a triptych.65 It conveys an insidious and rising sense of menace, a sense reinforced in the several visual versions by the seeming waves of overlapping and colliding text. Within each wave, words are inverted and reversed, and appear to shout in capital letters, as if language itself were drowning (fig. 11).

Fig. 11. Central panel from triptych printing of Cobbing, Are Your Children Safe in the Sea? (Writers Forum, 3rd edn, 1998).

65 Eyearun (Writers Forum, 1966), a publication in an unbound folder format, containing the triptych with other material. The triptcych was separately reprinted (3rd edn) by Writers Forum in 1998.

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In a multi-track (or, literally, multi-wave) recording of the poem made in 1966, Cobbing’s voices rise and fall, swell and collide, amongst quietly threatening ambient sounds.66 In its minimalism, its singular focus, its visual onomatopoeia, and its foregrounding of the graphic resources of language, ‘Are Your Children Safe in the Sea?’ is a typical concrete poem, exhibiting concentrated and resonant brevity.67 But the graphic style is already moving towards a more open and outward-facing abstraction that departs from the mimetic impulse of concretism, in its exploration of the obscurity of over-printing, its presentation of variable densities of registration, and in its attraction to the obliteration of words. Cobbing’s distinctive graphic style was later to be described as ‘dirty concrete’68 to distinguish it from the clean typographical inventiveness usually associated with concrete poetry, an inventiveness that quickly found, and continues to find, expression in the message-driven graphic design of commercial advertising. Cobbing kept a cutting of a newspaper advertisement which vividly warned of the tendency of natural rubber to ‘crumble’ by presenting its message – in classic concrete style – in a crumbling and tumbling typography (fig. 12).

Fig. 12. Advertisement in concrete poetry style. Add. MS. 88909/117.

66 Track 2 on the British Library CD The Spoken Word: bOB cobbing. The ambient, or disturbing, sounds were produced by Annea Lockwood. The recording was made in 1966. 67 For an overview and representative examples, see Mary Ellen Solt and Willis Barnstone (eds.), Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington, IN, 1968). 68 The terms ‘clean concrete’ and ‘dirty concrete’ are taken up by Steve McCaffery in K. David Jackson, Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker (eds.), Experimental-Visual-Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960s (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 400-4, who notes that the two terms were first proposed by Stephen Scobie, but does not give a reference. However, Scobie, Earthquakes and Explorations: Language and Painting from Cubism to Concrete Poetry (Toronto, 1997) recalls that the terms derive (‘with homely reductiveness’) from bpNichol (p. 67). Ian Davidson, Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 141-9, discusses distinctions between clean and dirty concrete poetry, as does Johanna Drucker, ‘Experimental/Visual/Concrete’, in Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics (New York, 1998), pp. 110-36. 22 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library

By way of contrast, Cobbing’s Writers Forum production of bpNichol’s Lament (1969) – the modest publication with its self-cancelling, over-printed pages that the British Museum rejected – is an example of concrete poetry’s dirty face (fig. 13).69

Fig. 13. The central pages of bpNichol, Lament (Writers Forum, 1969).

Another approach to assessing the formative influences on Cobbing’s poetry is to consider his contemporaneous work as an artist. The archive does not include any of Cobbing’s fine art works produced in the 1940s and 1950s – monoprints, works in gouache, in oil, and constructions in wood, wire and string – but it does provide information about them: listings of works by title, with a note of occasional sales made (for sums up to Three Guineas) and a note of works that were ‘scrapped’. There are several lists, one of which, spanning 1942-57, amounts to sixty items. There are also some photographs of exhibitions and a number of exhibition catalogues.70 Cobbing’s teaching notes for ‘The Arts Today’, a course of twenty-four meetings at Finchley Public Library (beginning 3 October 1958) bear the stamp of his integrated approach: ‘The aim of this course is to show that contemporary trends in the various arts are all fundamentally linked [...]. The course will be illustrated by gramophone records; films; epidiascope; reproductions and original paintings; and readings of prose, poetry and drama.’71 John Rowan’s retrospective introduction to Group H’s 36th exhibition, held at the Drian Galleries, London (October 1966), confirms that the general aesthetic direction of the Hendon group mirrored contemporary trends, that is to say a direction which led away from a constructivist abstract style – represented, for example, by

69 See above, n. 4 70 For listings of Cobbing’s art works, see Add. MS. 88909/41. The Hendon Experimental Art Group, formed in 1951, changed its name to the Hendon Group of Painters and Sculptors in 1954, and to Group H in 1957: see Add. MS. 88909/19-21 for exhibition catalogues and other related material. 71 Add. MS. 88909/25. Six exercise books.

23 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library work of Ben Nicholson – towards a more dynamic abstract expressionism, and towards the expressivity of art as event, epitomized by the counter-cultural art phenomenon known as the ‘happening’ that typified the inclusive cultural temperament of the 1960s.72 When the Hendon Group of Painters and Sculptors adopted its constitution in 1954, the aims were, noted Rowan, ‘to encourage creative painting in which abstract and structural qualities are a primary consideration.’ Rowan continued: ‘In succeeding years, a change took place which was well summarized in a manifesto-like statement by CENTO (actually Bob Cobbing) in the second issue of AND magazine, which appeared in 1961. The influence of abstract expressionism had become too strong to resist […]. No sooner had this happened than another wave struck – the influence of what might loosely be called pop painting. In 1963 Jeff Nuttall joined , and took to its logical conclusion a movement which had been agitating some of the members for a little while.’ The logical conclusion to which Rowan referred was the adoption of art as performance, which marked an aesthetic shift from art as fetishized object to art as ephemeral event, and had a particular pertinence to poetry cast as performance. One contemporary expression of this tendency, with which Cobbing had considerable involvement in 1966, was the destructive art movement. Auto-Destructive Art was originated in London by the neo- Dadaist Gustav Metzger in 1959.73 Rowan’s catalogue introduction recalled that, in 1962, Jeff Nuttall had burned his What again? Said the Duchess ‘in the yard behind East Finchley Library’. In the same spirit, a short poem by Cobbing entitled ‘’ (a notebook entry dated 3 May 1959) refers to ‘the necessary ruin / On which a firm clean world can be built’ and asserts, with an apocalyptic emphasis on the present: ‘No point NOW in being constructive / Annihilate the present / To ensure any future at all’.74 Subsequently, Cobbing was involved in the well-publicized Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) held in London (September 1966), involved as a performer, as a venue host, and as a member of the organizing committee.75 One of Cobbing’s lists of his art works records two destroyed items as ‘d.i.a.s. 1’ and ‘d.i.a.s. 2’.76 DIAS events included the destruction of furniture, pianos, sheets of glass, pillars of books, a dead lamb, and – if Ralph Ortiz’s proposed performance had been endorsed by the organizing committee, which included Cobbing – fifty live chickens. The Evening News reported (31 August 1966) that the Annea Lockwood, who sometimes performed and recorded with Cobbing, ‘destroys by vibration’. The Guardian observed (9 September 1966): ‘The destroyers-in-art include writers who

72 ‘In October of last year [1962] Duchamp drew my attention to the so-called “” that were taking place in very peculiar places in New York’, Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (London, 1965), p. 212. 73 For a retrospective view, see Gustav Metzger, ‘damaged nature, auto-destructive art’ (London, 1996). ‘Auto- destructive art,’ wrote Metzger (p. 25) ‘has its roots in the Dada movement, in Russian Revolutionart art 1910-20, and in a direction which is best represented by Moholy-Nagy.’ 74 For the notebook, see Add. MS. 88909/46. Cf. Nuttall (op. cit., p. 140): ‘Sickness was, then, for many, a will to enact some definitive ceremony of violence that would spend the aggression inherent in the collective subconscious, exorcise it and thus leave society cleansed of fear, with a clear way out for our over-accumulated frustrated energies. Some impulse of this nature informs Gustav Metzger, Ralph Ortiz, and the Vienna Institute of Direct Art.’ 75 The Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) was held at Africa Centre in Covent Garden, London, 9-11 September 1966. For the programme of events in which Cobbing participated, and which extended throughout September 1966 at various other London locations, see Add. MS. 88909/133, which includes several newspaper cuttings. The ‘Preliminary Report’ on DIAS, in the same File, records ‘the Honorary Committee of DIAS (September 1st 1966): Mario Amaya, Roy Ascott, Enrico Baj (Italy), Bob Cobbing, Ivor Davies, , Dom Sylvester Houédard, Gustav Metzger (Hon. Secretary), [Barry] Miles, Frank Popper (France), John J. Sharkey, Wolf Vostell (Germany).’ Two members of the Committee (Sharkey and Metzger) were charged by the Director of Public Prosecutions with ‘unlawfully causing to be shown and presented an indecent exhibition contrary to Common Law’ (see ‘Preliminary Report’). 76 Add. MS. 88909/41.

24 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library obliterate words, burn books, and cut odd words out of dictionaries and paste them up haywire. They tear books apart and shuffle the pages so that the narrative now reads surprisingly (which is art).’ By this time, Cobbing had left the world of school-teaching to work (1965-67) as the bookshop manager at Better Books, in Charing Cross Road, where several DIAS performances were held, including the digging of a hole in the floor of the basement.77 The bookshop soon developed a reputation under Cobbing’s direction as a leading supplier of avant-garde literature, particularly poetry, and more generally as London’s counter-cultural one-stop shop, offering books, information, and a schedule of events.78 Better Books also quickly established itself as the first port of call for visiting international poets who were looking for opportunities to read and to meet other writers. In 1961, Rowan’s voice had given out whilst reciting Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in North Finchley Library; four years later, one summer’s day in May 1965, Ginsberg himself walked into Cobbing’s bookshop: ‘Unannounced he wandered into Better Books one day and introduced himself. He offered to read anywhere for no fee. His first reading at Better Books’, chronicled Nuttall in revelational mode, ‘was the first healing wind on a very parched collective mind […]. We sat, packed tight, rather self-conscious. Bob Cobbing looked triumphant.’79 Cobbing’s career as a performance poet developed at a time when avant-garde practice across the arts found a receptive young , and its leakages can be particularly detected in popular music of the period. The on-stage guitar destruction finale favoured by Pete Townshend of The Who – first enacted, or performed, in 1964 – was inspired, Townshend later recalled, by an illustrated lecture that Metzger had given two years earlier at Ealing School of Art, when Townshend was a student.80 The experimental sound-collage ‘Revolution 9’ – the eight-minute track from The Beatles (1968) that sounds more like the musique concrète of John Cage or Luciano Berio than Lennon and McCartney – has a good claim to being, by virtue of the market penetration of brand Beatles, ‘the world’s most

77 In addition to hole-digging, the chronology in Metzger (op. cit., p. 90) records, for November 1965, a ‘Window-display at Better Books, London – manager Bob Cobbing – to coincide with the re-publication of Auto-Destructive Art: Metzger at A[rchitectural] A[ssociation]’; also, a window display at Better Books of the Art of Liquid Crystals and an evening (8 January 1966) of light projections (An Evening of AutoDestructive and Auto-Creative Art). Metzger’s liquid crystal art of mobile abstract images was quickly incorporated into psychedelic stage projections by rock bands such as and Cream. In 2006, The Tate Gallery purchased Metzger’s installation Liquid Crystal Environment (1965, remade 2005), T12160: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=89531 78 ‘This radical bookshop, then, was the model for what was attempted by the radical poets at the Poetry Society in the first half of the 1970s […] it combined book-shop, mail-order, and reading venue, with an emphasis on avant-garde and experimental writing.’ Barry, op. cit., pp. 17-18. ‘Underground’ film showings and performance-art can be added to the Better Books offering. London’s other influential bookshop of the period was the Bernard Stone’s Turret Bookshop, then located at Church Walk, Kensington, which also provided a meeting place for writers and a regular schedule of poetry readings. 79 Nuttall, op. cit., p. 238. , Ginsberg: A Biography (London, 1989), notes (p. 371): ‘Allen used Better Books, London’s main literary bookshop, as his headquarters’. One of the first Writers Forum publications was Ginsberg, The Change (1963), with a cover designed by Nuttall. Unfortunately, there is no trace of Ginsberg in Cobbing’s papers. 80 As a student at Ealing School of Art, Townsend attended a lecture by Metzger in December 1962, on ‘Auto-Destructive Art’ (Metzger, op. cit., p. 88). See also Mark Wilkerson, The Life of Pete Townshend (London, 2008), p. 28

25 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library widely distributed avant-garde artefact’.81 Radical art kept close company with political activism, at festivals and at spontaneous happenings, and in initiatives such as the Antiuniversity of London, a confederated programme of courses that, in the argot of the day, sought to develop through dialogue revolutionary teaching and learning strategies for an imminent new social order: ‘The Antiuniversity of London’, the Prospectus announced, ‘has been founded in response to the intellectual bankruptcy and spiritual emptiness of the educational establishment’. The Antiuniversity’s course leaders spanned a burgeoning London counter-culture and included Cornelius Cardew, David Caute , R. D. Laing, , Alex Trocchi, David Mercer, and Bob Cobbing, who offered with Annea Lockwood a fortnightly programme called ‘Sound Music into Poetry’.82 Cobbing’s progress in the mid-60s threaded around and between more familiar public narratives of the decade. In the same month of May that Ginsberg had walked into Better Books, was in town, playing the Albert Hall leg of his 1965 UK tour. The American Beat poet, lately installed in Cobbing’s bookshop – Ginsberg’s ‘headquarters’, according to Barry Miles (proprietor) – can be glimpsed amongst the transitory members of Dylan’s London hotel entourage in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film of the tour, Don’t Look Back (1967). Ginsberg’s offer to read took him to Liverpool and elsewhere in the country, and quickly led to his seminal reading one month later (11 June 1965) at the Albert Hall, at the ‘International Poetry Incarnation’, a sprawling, infamous and iconic event, as much political and social rally as reading, with a title that grandly alluded to the millennial Albion Jerusalem of . Cobbing also performed, along with many of the leading British and American poets of the day, to an estimated audience of more than 5,000 people.83 During this period, Cobbing’s film projectionist skills, honed in Hendon, led to his involvement in underground film showings, at Better Books and at festivals and rock music events, then becoming increasingly multi-medial in character. The underground newspaper (IT) was launched at the Roundhouse, Chalk Farm, on 15 October 1966: and Pink Floyd performed. IT reported that ‘Bob Cobbing and the London Film Coop gave an all-night film show featuring films like Scorpio Rising [Kenneth Anger], Towers Open Fire

81 Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (London, 1994), p. 230. The Beatles, a double album, is better known as ‘The White Album’. ‘Revolution 9’ was recorded and mixed by John Lennon in June 1968, whilst McCartney was in New York, and was very much indebted to the artistic influence of Yoko Ono. For a discussion of 1960s rock music and its interface with avant-garde music, see Edwin Pouncey, ‘Fables of Deconstruction’, The Wire, 185 (July 1999), available at: http://www.phinnweb.org/history/articles/concrete_rock.html 82 Prospectus [1968] for The Antiuniversity of London, in Add. MS. 88909/107, which includes various items concerning the Antiuniversity. Annea Lockwood is referred to in the Prospectus as ‘Anna’ Lockwood (the first name she then used). A poster announcing the ‘Faculty’ (including Cobbing, misspelt as ‘Cobbings’) is reproduced in Sophie Howarth, ‘The School of Life’, Tate Etc., 14 (2008), p. 88, and can also be viewed at: http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue14/schooloflife.htm 83 was one of the organizers of the event. The Live New Departures series of jazz and poetry events, organized by Horovitz, and featuring poets such as and Pete Brown, had been held up and down the country since the late 1950s, and was largely responsible for generating the underlying momentum to the Poetry Incarnation, a broad Blakean church of protest, pop and radicalism, raised to Albert Hall proportions by a rising tide of youth culture. See Horovitz (ed.), Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (Harmondsworth, 1969), with an Afterword by Horovitz that outlines the immediate history. The Poetry Incarnation was organized, Horovitz noted, ‘at a week’s notice’ (p. 336). There is a short documentary film of the event, Wholly Communion (Peter Whitehead, 1965).

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[William Burroughs], under the most difficult of conditions. The audience stood in front of the projectors, on top of the cables, on top of Bob Cobbing. Yet the films went on.’84

From white to ambient noise

If avant-garde practice found a receptive context within 1960s counter-culture, it was also welcomed, to a degree that may seem remarkable today, by the cultural centre, as represented by the programming of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which had long fostered against the grain of post-war popularity an audience for twentieth-century music, through radio broadcasts of concerts and recordings and through the regular commissioning of new works.85 But there was another and more direct way in which the BBC engaged with contemporary music (and poetry): through the pioneering work in recorded sound undertaken by its Radiophonic Workshop. The Workshop was established in the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios in 1958, as a technical support unit, but it quickly developed from a supportive function into an innovative force in its own right.86 Encouraged by the very positive critical reception of its ground-breaking radio production of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall (Third Programme, 1957)87 – the first BBC production to include, as it was then called, ‘radiophonic’ sound – the Corporation was also alert to contemporaneous developments in sound recording in continental broadcasting studios, particularly in Paris and Cologne. In Paris, at Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française, Pierre Schaeffer, the founding father of musique concrète, was exploring the manipulation of acoustic sounds recorded onto the new medium of magnetic tape, which enabled, for the first time, recorded sound to be not only variously manipulated but also divided and re-assembled – razored and joined – with great combinatory precision.88 Meanwhile, at the newly-established electronic studio at Cologne Radio, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others were pursuing an alternative approach by abandoning natural sounds altogether and generating elektronische Musik entirely from synthetic electronic signals.89 At the Maida Vale studios, the Radiophonic

84 Quoted in Julian Palacios, Lost in the Woods: and the Pink Floyd (London, 1998), p. 86. Around this time, Cobbing was hired as a projectionist by Yoko Ono (who was a participating artist in Metzger’s DIAS programme) to show her film, No. 4 (better known as ‘Bottoms’): ‘I met Yoko Ono at Better Books [...]. She wanted somebody to to go around with her and project her “Bottoms” film. I said I had a projector so we went round a lot of places in London, showing her film.’ (Cobbing interviewed, King, op. cit., p. 31). The film included Jeff Nuttall’s first screen appearance: see his obituary, The Times (14 January 2004). 85 William Glock was chiefly responsible, as BBC Controller of Music (1959-72) and as Controller of the Proms (1960-73). See Neil Edmunds, ‘William Glock and the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Music Policy, 1959-73’, Contemporary British History, 20:2 (2006), pp. 233-61. 86 Desmond Briscoe and Roy-Curtis-Bramwell, The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: The First 25 Years (London, 1983). 87 Donald McWhinnie, The Art of Radio (London, 1959), pp. 133-51. 88 John Dack, ‘Pierre Schaeffer and the Significance of Radiophonic Art’, Contemporary Music Review, 10:2 (1994), pp. 3-11. See also, Art Lange, ‘Musique Concrète & Early Electronic Music’, in Rob Young (ed.), The Wire Primers: A Guide to Modern Music (London, 2009), pp. 173-80, which usefully introduces several CD recordings: ‘After Schaeffer, melody, supported by some system of harmonic validation, was no longer the only game in town. Focus shifted to event attached to event, based on the quality and characteristics of the sound itself, creating its own tension, flow, rhythm, shape, movement’ (p. 173). 89 Michael Kurtz, Stockhausen: A Biography (London, 1992), pp. 39-40, 58-78. There were parallel developments in America (p. 40): ‘At the end of 1951, a few weeks after the founding of the Cologne project, the first New York “Music for Tape” experiments took place. In January 1952 came the première of John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 5, a four-minute tape piece whose material consisted of any sections from forty-two randomly selected gramophone records. In May of the same year, at Columbia University, Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky presented their first attempts to expand the timbral possibilities of classical instruments through reverberation, echo and distortion effects.’

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Workshop brought together both novel approaches, sculpting oscillation signals – until then, a valve-radio tuning annoyance – and recording an array of sounds for subsequent treatment. Such new sounds it preferred to term as ‘radiophonic’, pragmatically side-stepping debate whether the new soundscapes that were beginning to appear on the radio in a diverse range of programmes were music or not. By the same token, the Radiophonic Workshop’s were its technicians and its producers: musique concrète and electronic music were intrinsically resistant to conventional notation but were amenable to the unique performance of a single ‘pass’ in real time at the mixing desk. Cobbing gave his first complete performance of ABC in Sound at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in January 1965, a month after the composition was completed.90 One year later, 7 January 1966, a recorded version of the sequence was broadcast by the BBC, in which Cobbing’s voice was enhanced and supplemented by the resources of the Radiophonic Workshop: ‘Cobbing read his alphabet – an extensive montage of carefully chosen words in various languages – which the Workshop then speeded up, slowed down, dilated, distended, condensed and otherwise deformed.’91 The ‘M’ section, for example, a medley of Scottish surnames, was treated – somewhat literally – by the Workshop with a ‘skirling of bagpipes and similarly heathery sounds.’92 An entry in one of Cobbing’s notebooks (fig. 14) provides a useful summary of his recording and broadcasting commitments as the second act of the 1960s unfolded. In ‘The Exploding Sound’, a programme Cobbing made for Radio 3 in 1968, he outlined the (re-)emergence of sound poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, in relation to the advent of the tape recorder.93 Amongst the sound poetry recordings he introduced was the permutational poem ‘I Am That I Am’ by ‘cut-up’ experimenter Brion Gysin, recorded at the Radiophonic Workshop as early as 1960.94 There are striking points of formal correspondence between the micro-edited collagism of musique concrète, Gysin’s variations, the structuring of phonetic and non-phonetic sound poetry, and the contemporaneous processed prose of William Burroughs, and thus it is not surprising that the Radiophonic Workshop should have taken an immediate interest in this newly-emerging field that seemed to sit somewhere between poetry and music, and to be perfectly suited to radio. Cobbing’s introductory programme included extracts from three French sound poets who began working in the 1950s – Henri Chopin, Bernard Heidsieck and François Dufrêne – each of which, as Cobbing exemplified by recordings, exploited the enhanced scope for expression that the tape recorder provided. ‘Heidsieck’, narrated Cobbing, ‘began to make his Poèmes-Partitions in 1955. They use several, often three, sound sources, human, concrete or mechanical’. Chopin worked closely with the microphone, making a variety of sounds with mouth, nose and throat, ‘amplifying these, slowing them down, speeding them up, superimposing – one voice fifty-seven layers deep – the result is almost a musique concrète’. And Dufrêne, the third French sound poet Cobbing introduced, ‘may be considered a supra- lettriste’ who ‘has freed himself from the letter, which after the sentence and the word had disappeared was the last refuge of phonetic poetry’.95 The radio programme ended with a multi-

90 Eric Mottram, ‘A Prosthetics of Poetry: The Art of Bob Cobbing’, Second Aeon, 16/17 ([1973]), p. 105. 91 Briscoe and Curtis-Bramwell, op. cit., p. 116. 92 Ibid. 93 The programme was recorded 14 June 1968, and first broadcast on Radio 3, 29 August 1968. The producer was George Macbeth, who was responsible for commissioning the programme. 94 Briscoe and Curtis-Bramwell, op. cit., pp. 115-17, which includes Gysin’s long machine-like columns of permutated text: ‘I Am That I Am’, reprinted from William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind (London, 1979), pp. 78-9. 95 For the broadcast script, with autograph annotations and revisions, see Add. MS. 88909/120. There is an interesting exchange of letters of later date (1983) between Chopin and Cobbing, referring to a subsequent Cobbing radio broadcast (‘The Electronic Sound’), in which Chopin objects to Cobbing’s brief history of sound poetry, and supplies a number of corrective details, to which Cobbing responds in equal measure. See Chopin to Cobbing [1983] in Add. MS. 88909/37/4, and Cobbing to Chopin (7 September 1983) in Add. MS. 88909/34/2.

28 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library

Fig. 14. Bob Cobbing’s radio broadcasts (1966-68). Notebook, inside front cover. Add. MS. 88909/112.

29 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library media vision of sound poetry in performance that, in effect, sketched the multifarious character of many of Cobbing’s stimulant-rich collaborative performances. Voice and ‘the machine’ (the tape recorder tool) are presented as complementary forces mediated by context: ‘Imagine a stage with multiple sound-points from each of which issues a strand in the complicated weave of machine sound. Then put a human being on the stage and let him read with the machine and against the machines. Or several human beings. Or sound-points in the auditorium as well as on the stage. Or a human being at the back of the hall, in the balcony, in the audience. Or use lighting and movement. Mime, or film, or ballet. Or visual poetry. A poem is a visual pattern as well as a pattern of sound. The visual elements may perform. Machines can move words and letters; lights can turn off and on, shapes can reflect, cast shadows, dance….’96 Cobbing’s visualization, which grounds performance as an action shared within an immediate and unique physical context, accords well with first-hand accounts of many of his performances, up to and including performances of Domestic Ambient Noise given towards the end of his life.97 Of course, not all of Cobbing’s performances were multi-medial, and most were more intimate events. Although Cobbing made a number of explorative recordings with the tape recorder during this period – encouraged and instructed by his visits to the Fylkingen studios in Stockholm (yet another centre of experimental sound activity associated with national broadcasting: Sveriges Radio) – the tape recorder did not prove to be the tool through which his sound poems were realized, in the hermetic manner that it circumscribed, for example, Chopin’s work.98 Thus, there was no definitive Cobbing performance of any given work, and no attempt to produce definitive recordings to be played austerely to an assembled audience in a manner that Cobbing came to think of as a rather solemn Swedish sound-text approach.99 Cobbing’s performances were frequently collaborative, and were characterized by an interpretive and improvizational spontaneity that arose not only from the promptings of visual texts (when texts were used) but also from the interaction between performers, and between the performers and their audience. When texts were used, they were always uniquely

96 Broadcast script (Add. MS. 88909/120). 97 Peter Manson, ‘DAN done’, a post to the British Poets e-mail discussion list (2000), available at: http://www.petermanson.com/Dandone.htm; Robert Sheppard, ‘Bob Cobbing: Sightings and Soundings’, Jacket, 9 (1999), available at: http://www.jacketmagazine.com/09/shep-cobb.html; and ‘Domestic Ambient Buoys (Bob Cobbing and Lawrence Upton) in Discussion with Alaric Sumner, August 1999, London’, Riding the Meridian, vol. 1, no. 1 (1999), available at: http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/interbclu.html 98 However, Cobbing often remarked that his vocal range had been extended by attending to the tape recorder’s capacity to capture and transform the fleeting particles of speech: ‘The tape recorder, by its ability to amplify and superimpose, and to slow down the vibrations, has enabled us to rediscover the possibilities of the human voice, until it becomes again something we can almost see and touch’. Cobbing, ‘The Shape and Size of Poetry’, Kroklok, 2 (1971), p. 33. See also, Cobbing, ‘What the tape-recorder teaches the poet’ (1985), in Add. MS. 88909/44, a statement that refers to his radio broadcast ‘The Electronic Voice’ (1983). 99 Sentiments echoed by Peter Finch: ‘The Swedish enthusiasm led to the establishment of the first International Festival of Sound Text Composition in Stockholm during 1968. Poetry readings by sound poets at this time were characterized by the poet arriving to announce the name of the piece. The poet would then walk off to leave a tape recorder with decks spinning in the centre of the stage. Some 45 minutes later the poet would return to turn the Grundig off. At this point the small and often somnambulant audience would awake and softly applaud.’ Finch, ‘Sound Poetry in the UK’, available at: http://www.57productions.com/article_reader.php?id=11

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‘read’ – shared – as imminent and ephemeral productions. Cobbing’s performance partnerships – chiefly, Konkrete Canticle, abAna, Oral Complex and Birdyak100 – can be traced in the archive and were a testament to his practice of continuous performance-renewal and experiment, which embraced a range of musical contexts, from electronic music to vaudeville, and from jazz to ‘anarchic thrash noise’ (fig. 15).101 Konkrete Canticle’s performance of Paula Claire’s Stone Tones at the 11th International Sound Poetry Festival (Toronto, 1978) – a performance which involved reading the physical features of hand-held rocks102 – was an inspiring and influential moment that reverberated strongly amongst Canada’s emerging community of sound poets, particularly amongst two ensembles present at the Festival, Owen Sound and The Four Horsemen.103 A second British performance group at the Toronto Festival, jgjgjg (comprising Lawrence Upton, and cris cheek) was also singled out for comment by Steve McCaffery (one of The Four Horsemen) in his review of the event, which highlighted the impact at the Festival of the dirty concrete ‘School of Bob’ [Cobbing]. ‘Konkrete Canticle’, observed McCaffery, ‘have extended the notion of text beyond a stereography on paper, into readings of entire environments [….]. For their final piece at the Festival, Konkrete Canticle moved through the audience reading the textures of the auditorium walls, the code potential of the architecture.’104 The ‘School of Bob’ was in fact a reasonably accurate description of Cobbing’s informal mentoring relationship to a number of younger British poets who read regularly at Writers Forum meetings and at the readings co-ordinated by Cobbing at the Poetry Society, some of whom also developed printing skills under his supervision at the Poetry Society print shop, which included exposure to a dirty concrete dexterity that was not included in the manufacturer’s manual. Lawrence Upton, cris cheek, Ulli Freer, , Adrian Clarke, Robert Sheppard and Maggie O’Sullivan have each testified in different ways to

100 Key members of the performance groups were: Cobbing, Paula Claire, Michael Chant, Bill Griffiths (Konkrete Canticle); Cobbing, Paul Burwell, David Toop, Lyn Conetta, Christopher Small, Herman Hauge (abAna); Cobbing, Clive Fencott, John Whiting (Oral Complex); and Cobbing, Hugh Metcalfe, , Jennifer Pike [Cobbing] (Birdyak). Another notable recording and performance collaborator was Peter Finch: see Claire Powell, ‘The Art of Noise: Peter Finch Sounds Off ’, Welsh Writing in English, vol. 2 (1996), pp. 138-61 (copy held in Add. MS. 88909/128). 101 Robert Sheppard: ‘the anarchic thrash noise ensemble of Bird Yak (Hugh Metcalfe on guitar and amplified gas mask, veteran improviser Lol Coxhill on saxophone, and his wife Jennifer, dancing)’. Sheppard, obituary for Bob Cobbing, The Guardian (7 October 2002). 102 A photograph of Cobbing and Griffiths performing a rock at the Festival is included in Larry Wendt, ‘Sound Poetry: I. History of Electro-Acoustic Approaches, II. Connections to Advanced Electronic Technologies’, Leonardo, 18:1 (1985), pp. 11-23 (copy held in Add. MS. 88909/121). See also Claire’s Introduction to Stone Tones (Writers Forum, 1974): ‘During 1972, while interpreting pieces like Bob Cobbing’s 15 Shakespeare Kaku, Judith and Mary Rudolph’s Chromosomes, I got used not only to improvising to deliberately ambiguous letter forms but blobs, smudges and dashes amongst these letter patterns. So by May 1973, I found my eye drawn to patternings on stone, bark, water, woodknots, sliced cabbages, cobwebs [...] and recognising them as sound poems’ (a copy of the Introduction is held in Add. MS. 88909/125). 103 For a discussion of Canadian concrete poetry, see Caroline Bayard, The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-Modernism (Toronto, 1989). 104 Steve McCaffery, review of ‘11th International Festival of Sound Poetry, October 14-21, 1978, Toronto’, Centerfold (February/March 1979), pp. 142-3. Copy held in Add. MS. 88909/121. See also McCaffery, ‘Voice in Extremis’, in (ed.), Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford, 1998), pp. 162-77.

31 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library

Fig. 15. Flyer for a performance by Birdyak at The Trolley Stop, Hackney, London (31 July 1991). Add. MS. 88909/141.

32 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library

Cobbing’s guidance and example, and many others could be added to this list. Indeed, the title of a paper by Clarke is explicit: ‘Time in the School of Cobbing’.105 The Toronto performance lessons of a notional School of Cobbing and its curriculum of dirty concrete Writers Forum publications – including the aforementioned Lament (1969) by Four Horseman bpNichol – were important sites of linkage between a post-‘poetry wars’ generation of London-based avant-garde poets and the ‘language poetry’ movement that began to emerge from America and Canada in the 1970s.106 The full history of that exchange has yet to be written, but in contrast to the transatlantic centre of gravity reflected in Mottram’s Poetry Review, the flow of transatlantic avant-garde traffic from the late 1970s and beyond was more of a two-way street. Robert Hampson’s paper, ‘cheek in Manhattan’,107 has identified examples and scenes of reciprocal engagement and exchange between elements of a London avant-garde and its North American counterparts. Two notable London-based poetry magazines of the period – Alembic (edited by Hampson and Peter Barry) and Reality Studios (edited by Ken Edwards) – published radical new work that reflected this common poetic front.108 Cobbing’s archive at the British Library offers further documentary evidence to substantiate this dialogue through its record of Writers Forum publications, its record of readings by a new generation of visiting American and Canadian poets (fig. 16), and through many letters in his extensive correspondence files (requests to read tended to be placed with Cobbing in the first instance). Writers Forum published, for example, Steve McCaffery’s Modern Reading: Poems 1969-1990 (1992): ‘I’m still unhappy with the title Modern Reading but can’t think of a suitable alternative at the moment […] some of the typed pieces have either typos or visible corrections. I hadn’t realized that you were to print directly from my manuscript copy’ (McCaffery to Cobbing, 24 October 1990).109 And Writers Forum published the collaborative works eXcLa (1993) by Maggie O’Sullivan and , and BothBoth (1987) by Cobbing and Andrews: ‘Ever since I saw some of the copy art you had at home this notion has been percolating. Very attracted to their elegance, chaos, precision and density – and felt they’d be an interesting counterpart/counterpoint to some language constructions of my own’ (Andrews to Cobbing, September 1986).110 In fact, the association between Cobbing and Andrews began in the 1970s: ‘Here are some new sound pieces of mine, parts of a long mss. (LOVE SONGS) […] dealing w/ some of the same language issues my earlier work was involved with (nonreferential organization, attenuation of context, etc)’.111

105 Adrian Clarke, ‘Time in the School of Cobbing’, Pores: A Journal of Poetics Research, 3, available at: http://www.pores.bbk.ac.uk/3/clarke.html 106 For a representative anthology of American ‘language poetry’, see (ed.), In the American Tree (Orono, ME, 1986 and 2002). For a selection of critical prose, see Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1984). For a general introduction, see Bob Perelman, ‘Language Writing and Literary History’, in Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry (Princeton, 1996), pp. 11-37. 107 Robert Hampson, ‘cris cheek in Manhattan’, Pores: A Journal of Poetics Research’, 1, available at: http://www.pores.bbk.ac.uk/1/index.html 108 For Alembic and Reality Studios, see Miller and Price, op. cit., pp. 127, 218, 312. See Wolgang Görtschacher, op. cit., for interviews with Ken Edwards (pp. 233-64) and Robert Hampson (pp. 388-424). Readers of post- war British avant-garde poetry will be conscious that this article is (inevitably) London-centric. For a critical and dissenting view (from Cambridge) of ‘language poetry’, see, for example, David Marriott, ‘Signs Taken for Signifiers: Language Writing, Fetishism and Disavowal’, in Romana Huk (ed.), Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally (Middletown, CT, 2003), pp. 338-46. 109 In Add. MS. 88909/38/8. 110 In Add. MS. 88909/37/1. Andrews’s letter includes the extracts from Love Songs to which it refers. Unfortunately, BothBoth (1987) and eXcLa (1993) are two further instances of Writers Forum publications not held by the British Library. 111 Andrews to Cobbing, January 1974, in Add. MS. 88909/36/1.

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Fig. 16. New River Project flyer for a London reading by Karen Mac Cormack and Steve McCaffery (29 January 1989). Add. MS. 88909/140.

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The years that followed the battles of Earls Court were characterized, in terms of critical theory and nascent poetics, by the post-modernist crisis of the sign. Locally, so to speak, this newly-dominant mode of discourse, which took language as its elusive subject and problematized representation, found a graphic analogue, a ready pre-echo, in Cobbing’s dismantled alphabet and fractured frame of reference, which invoked in ways both entertaining and disturbing the early twentieth-century rent in the fabric of representation. In 1991, Adrian Clarke and Robert Sheppard published an anthology which featured work by a new generation of London-based radical poets. American ‘language poet’ Bruce Andrews provided an introduction to the anthology – Floating Capital: New Poets from London (published, significantly enough, in America) – in which he referred enthusiastically to ‘a pool already brimming with extra-literary, Continental, & non-canonical British possibilities’.112 The enigmatic title of the anthology combined political and economic reference, punned upon ‘capital’, and called to mind, like a phrasal rhyme, a term from semiotics apposite to an anthology of language-centred writing: the floating signifier. Additionally, the title seemed to hint at a style of transcursive reading – discussed several years earlier by Allen Fisher as ‘float perception’113 – that suited the disjunctive texts the anthology presented: a readerly attention that proceeds freely across the surface of the work with a ‘floating’ concentration that resists, as it glides, the catch and snag of conventional reading practice. Cobbing’s visual (or spatial) texts come to mind, which offer the ‘reader’ or viewer a surface for the eyes’ exploration but no pre-determined reading pathway, and no particular points of departure and termination.114 At the head of the anthology, prominence was given to selections from the work of Cobbing and Allen Fisher, in ‘acknowledgement of their various and substantial productions before the period covered by the anthology and their importance, in a variety of ways, for many of the writers who follow.’115 Thus, the publication of Floating Capital was not only a selection of new writing: it was also, explicitly, a determined marker of periodization.116 More recently, the publication of Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars has prompted retrospective discussion of the social and political context to the resignation of the Poetry Society’s radical membership, and of its years of cultural marginalization that followed.117 As Hampson remarked: ‘The dispersal of this area of poetic

112 Introduction by Bruce Andrews (entitled ‘Transatlantic’) to Adrian Clarke and Robert Sheppard (eds.), Floating Capital: New Poets from London (Elmwood, CT, 1991), p. i. The anthology included work by Bob Cobbing, Allen Fisher, Gilbert Adair [printed as ‘Adiar’], Paul Brown, Chris Cheek [cris cheek], Adrian Clarke, Kelvin Corcoran, Ken Edwards, Virginia Firnberg, Peter Middleton, Maggie O’Sullivan, Val Panucci, Robert Sheppard, and Hazel Smith. 113 Allen Fisher, ‘Necessary Business’, Spanner, 25 (1985), p. 184. The term is cited by Hampson in ‘cris cheek in Manhattan’. See also Fisher’s comments on Oral Complex at the L.M.C. (Writers Forum Cassette No. 4), ‘Float Perception and Glue Balls’, Reality Studios, vol. 6 (1984), pp. 93-8. 114 See Davidson, op. cit., p. 144, where an architectural analogy is made: ‘Perspective is no longer fixed, as it was for much earlier graphically based concrete poetry, but shifts according to viewpoint […]. The reader has to move about within the poem in order to produce a range of different spaces’. See also Davidson’s reading of McCaffery’s Carnival panels (pp. 134-7, 146-9). 115 ‘Afterword’, Clarke and Sheppard (eds.), op. cit., pp. 121-2. 116 For further discussion, see Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying (as in n. 29), pp. 142-52: ‘Instead of the post- Olsonian open field poetics favoured by Mottram, Clarke and I affirmed a Lyotardian postmodern poetics’ (p. 148). 117 See, for example, Robert Sheppard, ‘Poets Behaving Badly’, Jacket, 31 (2006), available at: http://jacketmagazine.com/31/sheppard-barry.html

35 eBLJ 2010, Article 9 From the Bombast of Vachel Lindsay to the Compass of Noise: The Papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library activity to community centres, colleges, and, most of all, rooms over public houses [the intimate and reduced setting for many Cobbing performances] during the 1980s meant that, though the work continued and developed beyond the late-modernism of the 1970s, it could now be safely ignored. The “Battles of Earls Court” left the alternative traditions of British poetry divided into factions and heavily wounded.’118 Hampson’s vocabulary of division and injury conveys a mood of pathos, but throughout these ‘wounded’ later decades of the century – and some have argued that the marginalization endured was self-inflicted119 – Cobbing’s work continued unabated, including his enabling work as a publisher.120 The emergence of a fully-developed digital environment in the first decade of the present century has done much to facilitate new poetry that straddles and explores the boundaries between text, art, music and voice. The distribution of poetry – which was very much at the heart of what had been contested, within a narrow and centralized economy, at Earls Court – has been transformed. Concrete poetry, in its classic conception, has re-arisen invigorated with electronic purpose and has adapted well to a reconfigured conceptual space. However, its dirty concrete poetry variant has a paper-bound medium-specific quality that does not transfer well to digital reproduction: the precision of pixels cannot satisfactorily reproduce the graduated visual noise and inky quiddity of a dirty page.121 Despite the apparent ease with which Cobbing gave voice to graphic marks, the material quality of his work – its concreteness – is intrinsically resistant to media transfer, and it can be argued that the vocalization of Cobbing’s visual texts necessarily involves the paradoxical gain of an acute realization of their mute and graphic obduracy, their material concreteness. Thus, it follows that the preservation of Cobbing’s fragile paper record is of the first importance. Equally, there is a general lack of detailed documentation concerning British poetry’s fugitive performance tradition.122 A recent survey has commented: ‘We need the scattered collections of recorded material to be archived and analysed so that we can trace changes in the presentation of voice, the paratexts and “circumpoetics” of introductions and commentary

118 Robert Hampson, ‘Preface’ to Barry, op. cit., p. xvi. 119 Andrew Duncan, The Council of Heresy: A Primer of Poetry in a Balkanised Terrain (Exeter, 2009), p. 83: ‘When Mottram’s job at the Poetry Review came to an acrimonious end in February of 1977, it was along with thirteen resignations from the Board of the Poetry Society. People have acted as if this deprived everyone else of legitimacy; but there can be no reinstatement. Instead, this self-exile wrote a whole generation out of history, and meant its influence on the British poetry emerging over the next two decades would be nil.’ 120 Barry, op. cit., pp. 182-3, comments: ‘Often, the institutions of the “parallel tradition” have extraordinary longevity – the Writers Forum workshops, for instance, have gone on for fifty years [...]. Paradoxically, too, they tend to be (literally) conservative institutions which keep alive a particular set of possibilities and practices which are unacknowledged or disregarded by the centre.’ For current Writers Forum meetings and publications, visit www.wfuk.org.uk/blog. 121 I am thinking here particularly of ink-duplicated works. See Lawrence Upton’s paper, ‘Bob Cobbing: and the book as medium; designs for poetry’ (as in n. 40): ‘Duplicator ink took a long time to dry. One used absorbent paper made for the purpose and the marks were slightly blurry compared to the sharpness of a photocopier. Even so the results could stay wet for some time. Gobbets of ink could stay wet for years. This is an art which requires one to be willing to become blackened.’ 122 At a recent event (21 October 2009) to launch the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, the poet Caroline Bergvall spoke of ‘poetic forms that have hitherto had an erratic, marginalised presence within English [...] the expanded poetics that have emerged for the past say, twenty years and that are radically redefining the terms by which poetics overall will function. Some call it “expanded writing”, “literary arts”, “performance writing”, “performative writing”, “off-page writing”, etc’. Bergvall, ‘Birkbeck Launch Event 2009: Selected Papers’, p. 21, available at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22924473/Journal-of-British-and- Irish-Innovative-Poetry-Birkbeck-Launch-Event-2009-Selected-Papers

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[...]. Then we need information on who read where and when, on the place of readings in many different individual careers, and the place of funding organizations and entrepreneurs.’123 The papers of Bob Cobbing at the British Library, and a complementary sound archive of three hundred open reels and more, are key components for the assembly of such a record.

poetics of domestic noise fabric of the everyday a silent tongue sounding an eye scanning does a blank page not have a duration is it silence or noise we tongue it with our eyes polyphonic skin of event on the pool of meaning making active erasure of existing common sense interrogating conventional boundaries through gesture and posture124

123 Nicky Marsh, Peter Middleton, and Victoria Sheppard, ‘“Blasts of Language”: Changes in Oral Poetics in Britain since 1965’, Oral Tradition, 21/1 (2006), pp. 44-67, p. 47. 124 From Cobbing, ‘random and system’, Shrieks & Hisses: Collected Poems Volume Sixteen (Buckfastleigh: 1999), np.

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