Bob Cobbing Early Life Early Involvement With Poetry And

Cobbing was born in Enfield and grew up within the Plymouth Brethren. He attended Enfield Grammar School and then trained as an accountant. He later went to Bognor Training College to become a teacher. During the Second World War, he was a conscientious objector.

2 Early Involvement with Poetry and Performance

His involvement with performance began with the Hendon Experimental Art Club and the HendonHendon is a place in London, England in the London Borough of Barnet. Hendon, along with neighbouring Golders Green, has a large Jewish population and a number of synagogues. Hendon is the site of the Hendon Police Training School, the training centre for-based magazine And in 1951Events January events January 9 United Nations headquarters officially opens ( New York City). January 15 Ilse Koch, The "Witch of Buchenwald," wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, is sentenced to life imprisonment in a court in We. This led to his setting up Writers Forum, which began publishing in 1963Events January-March January 11 The Whisky A Go-Go night club in Los Angeles, the first disco in the USA, is opened. January 14 George Wallace becomes governor of Alabama. January 22 Elysee treaty between France and Germany January 28 Black student Harvey. In 1964Events January January 1 Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is dissolved. January 3 Senator Barry Goldwater announces that he will seek the Republican nomination for President. January 5 In the first meeting between leaders of the Roman Catholic and Ort he published ABC In Sound, a book that combined his interest in sound and concrete poetry in an exploration of the visual and auditory possibilities of the English alphabetThe letters The English alphabet has 26 letters: Notes The letters "A", "E", "I", "O", "U" are vowels; the rest are consonants. Sometimes "Y" and "W" are considered vowels too; these are semivowels. The English alphabet is derived from the Latin alphabet.. He left teaching around this time and managed Better Books on Charing Cross RoadCharing Cross Road is a London street which runs north from Trafalgar Square to St Giles' Circus and then becomes Tottenham Court Road. It is so called because it leads from Charing Cross. It is renowned for its specialist and second-hand bookshops. The s, LondonLondon is the capital of the United Kingdom and of England, and with over seven million inhabitants in the Greater London area, is the second-most populous conurbation in Europe (after Moscow). From being Londinium the capital of the Roman province of Bri. This shop was the venue for a number of events and happeningsHappenings has multiple meanings (besides the straightforward dictionary definition): The Happenings were a 1960s pop music group whose major hits were "See You In September" and a cover of "I Got Rhythm" updated for the nascent pop/rock era. In the art w associated with what Cobbing's friend Jeff Nuttall termed the Bomb Culture, the British version of the 1960s counterculture.

3 The 1970s

During the first half of the 1970s, Cobbing was able to use the facilities of the Poetry Society to produce Writers Forum books. In all, the press published over 1,000 titles between 1963 and 2002. As well as fostering the younger poets of the British Poetry Revival, Writers Forum also published works by John Cage, Allen Ginsberg and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Writers Forum also ran a regular Saturday afternoon writers' workshop at which poets read and discussed each other's work.

In the early 1970s the Poetry Society did not have any printing facilities. Cobbing had his own equipment elsewhere throughout the 40 years of his (largely solo) operation of Writers Forum. In the mid-1970s, against tremendous opposition of the rump of the old guard on the Poetry Society General Council, Cobbing and others opened a public print shop on the society's premises. Cobbing brought in his own equipment and allowed it to be used by anyone wishing to print their own book of poetry. Later the society provided a desktop litho, plate-maker and golfball typewriter with a diversion of the funds allocated to Poetry Review which was henceforth, for some years, printed in house.

Cobbing also explored his interest in performance works for multiple voices and musical instruments in groups like Bird Yak and Konkrete Canticle, which included poets Paula Claire , Michael Chant and Bill Griffiths. He was also co-founder of the Association of Little Presses, an organisation that promoted the work of small publishers in Britain and Ireland.

4 Later Life and Work

Cobbing was a prolific writer and performer and continued to work right up to his death. He also used his teacher training to work on performances with school children. Much of his later work consists of visual texts and markings that were used as notations or, more strictly speaking, jumping off points for performance. He also worked on more directly collaborative works with other poets, such as the Domestic Ambient Noise project, a series of 300 booklets created with his friend and fellow Writers Forum editor Lawrence Upton . Since Cobbing's death, Upton has carried on the work of running Writers Forum.

5 External links

Cobbing, Bob Cobbing, Bob Cobbing, Bob

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