Bob Cobbing 1950-1978: Performance, Poetry and the Institution
Abstract
Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was a poet known for his performances and as an
organiser of poetry events, as a participant in the British Poetry Revival, as a
late-modernist and as a sound and concrete poet. This thesis seeks to reconfigure
our view of Cobbing as a performer by considering his performances across a
range of institutions to argue that this institutionalised nature was their defining
aspect. It maps the transition from Cobbing’s defence of amateurism and
localism in the 1950s to his self-definition as a professional poet in the mid
1960s and his attempt to professionalise poetry in the 1970s. This process was
not uncontested: at each stage the idea of the poet and the reality of what it meant
to live as a poet were at stake
The first chapter considers Cobbing’s poems and visual artworks of the
1950s in the context of Hendon Arts Together, the suburban amateur arts
organisation he ran for ten years, and it situates both in Britain’s postwar social
and cultural welfare system. Chapter two analyses Cobbing’s transition from
Finchley’s local art circles to his creative and organisational participation in
London’s international counterculture, specifically the Destruction in Art
Symposium (9-11 September 1966). Chapter three considers ABC in Sound in
the context of the International Poetry Incarnation (11 June 1965) and analyses
Cobbing’s emergence as a professional poet. Chapter four examines Cobbing’s
tape-based poems of 1965-1970 and their associated visual scores in the context
of audio technology, and the role they played in Cobbing’s professionalisation.
The final chapter examines Cobbing’s performances at the Poetry Society (1968-
1978) in order to investigate the effects of subsidy and friendship on poetic
performance.
Authors
Willey, StephenCollections
- Theses [4490]