The Spoken Word: Bob Cobbing

Bob Cobbing (1920–2002) was a British sound, visual, concrete, and performance poet; a central member of the British Poetry Revival; and an influence on generations of artists, sound experimenters, educators, poets, and printmakers. Perhaps his most famous work is 26 Sound Poems, several poems of which are included here, alongside collaborations with Annea Lockwood, Henri Chopin, François Dufrêne, and others, as well as previously unreleased archival recordings from the BBC and the British Library’s Sound Archive, in which the listener can hear Cobbing’s unique exploration of the visual and auditory possibilities inherent in the English alphabet. In a career marked by the emergence of the 1960s counterculture and the thrilling potential for sound-based performance poetics, the work of Bob Cobbing stands alone as an instrument at play for the human voice; a testament to the core interdisciplinarity between writings for print and sound; and the strangely verbal incantations implicit in the concrete poetry he championed.

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Running time 66 minutes.