Two Recordings:

Two Recordings have been added to the Photo and Video gallery page of my Beyond Text Website. One is of Sean Bonney performing a section from his long poem The Commons and the other is of Bob Cobbing and Annea Lockwood performing their poem Are Your Children Safe In The Sea (1966) available of the newly issued British Library C.D.

Bob Cobbing C.D Available to Buy

The C.D of early Bob Cobbing recordings 1965-1973 has just been issued by the British Library as part of their The Spoken Word series. I provided the introductory sleeve notes to this publication.

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, François Dufrêne and others.

The C.D is available to buy from the British Library shop and is a good introduction to the early sound work of this interesting poet. Some of the visual scores for the poems are viewable in the British Library reading rooms. To see the relationship between the visual page and the performed sound should be part of the Cobbing experience.