verbivisivoco

Bob Cobbing, who died in 2002, was a senior and major exponent of the international concrete poetry movement, but he was a visual artist before he was a poet. His earliest duplicator print of 1942 presages his later work and his interest in the mechanics and accidents of office, rather than fine art, printing. However it was not until 1964, after some years of involvement in the literary underground, as recorded in Chapter 2, that Cobbing came to maturity with the alliterative sequence ABC in Sound. By this time the awareness he had gained of the international concrete poetry movement and the various forms of 1960s interart, meant he gave himself to such experimentation with great energy.

The basic orientation that unites most forms of concrete poetry – in its recent century of experiment – is that it foregrounds, by emphasis or distortion, one or more of the conventional elements of poetic artifice (such as lineation or rhyme and alliteration, or even simply letters and their appearance in books), or their attendant sounds, and concentrates upon the resulting materiality of language. Appropriately, at one time the term ‘abstract’ was as popular as ‘concrete’ to describe this work. The link between the physical signifier and the conceptual signified of other kinds of language is problematized, a particular kind of the suspension of the naturalizing processes that Forrest-Thomson describes, another way of literally emphasizing the saying of language as against its said.

This poetry has been conventionally divided into two types: visual poetry and sound poetry, both of which were practised by Cobbing.

In visual poetry the physical signs of print on paper assume prominence. At its simplest there are the pattern poems of George Herbert or Dylan Thomas. The more experimental ‘calligrammes’ of Apollinaire prefigured modernist experiments in words arranged in patterns upon the page, whether it be the characteristic typographical violence of Futurist ‘words in freedom’ (‘ScrAbrrRrraaNNG!’) or the comparative stasis of Gomringer's word ‘constellations’ (itself a term borrowed from Mallarmé's influential Un Coup de dés of 1897), such as his ‘silencio’ (the word repeated in rows, though with a ‘silent’ gap in the middle). The Brazilian Noigandes group of the 1950s, the Lettrism of Heidesieck, and the spatialism of Pierre Garnier suggest the range of visual experiment.