Bob Cobbing

This title includes BBC recordings of Bob Cobbing reading his early work. Many of the tracks are previously unpublished. Concerns the work of a unique and intriguing poet. Other titles in the series have received press coverage in national newspapers in the UK and USA plus coverage on BBC radio. Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was a crucial figure in the British avant-garde poetry and publishing scenes of the latter half of the twentieth century. The primary focus of his energies was performance sound poetry, a pan-continental phenomenon whose practitioners dispensed with conventional poetic language and syntax almost entirely. For Cobbing, a graphic pattern was as fitting a score for performance as a text. The recordings in this collection are drawn mainly from private tapes now in the care of the British Library and include Cobbing's first commercially issued sound work "26 Sound Poems" plus collaborations with Annea Lockwood, Henri Chopin, Francois Dufrene and others.