Monday, September 12, 2016

Robert Sheppard: My Bob Cobbing 'Archive'

I have twice displayed all of my Bob Cobbing materials (minus the Writers Forum materials) this summer, once for William Cobbing, editor of Boook, and secondly for Rosie Cooper, also an editor of Booook. Both have mounted exhibitions of Bob Cobbing’s work (see here ) and both visits were great fun and turned up all sorts of interesting objects and associated notions. (I particularly started to think about Cobbing's very latre pieces, written around the time of the Third ABC in Sound. I took some photographs of the ‘display’ and it is quite surprising what one can see.

See also about a performance of the poem I wrote with Cobbing,
Blatent Blather/Virulent Whoops of 2000-2001, which may be read here.) And there's a video of its last outing with me playing myself and Patricia Farrell reading the parts of Cobbing: here.

Here is an account of my first meeting with Cobbing in 1973, the occasion for the gathering of the first items here. My general introduction to his work may be read here.

You can just spot a pile of the editions of ABC in Sound below and I write about it here, on the event of the latest Veer publication of it 


I write about the Third ABC in Sound (which is a completely different work) here:



A general view of everything. It looks less than it is like this.


And magazine, a pile of Jennifer Cobbing pieces, some 'Winter' Poems and part of the cover of a book published for Bob's 75th birthday (I think)
Some sound recordings and collaborations; a Hansjorg Mayer 'Chamber Music' from 1968

That's BOOOOOOK in the foreground; Bob's Collected Poems in the background, including the box set Processual, for which I wrote the introduction, which is the poem 'The Micropathology of the Sign' (see here)

These are some of the 300 parts of Domestic Ambient Noise, Bob's collaboration with Lawrence Upton. That's the visual index in front of it (which seems also to be an invitation to a reading)

Volumes of Bob's Collected Poems (each published by a different little press) My introduction to the invisible box at the bottom, Processual, may be read here.

Some of Bob's very late colour computer texts, which I'm not sure many people have seen (you can just catch the corner of his 1987 computer poems

Part of a letter explaining his activities in 2002


More of the late colour pieces

One later work

Another later work


I think this is from Seventy Not Out, a birthday text from 1990

[NB 2021: My two Writers Forum collaborations with Bob Cobbing have been republished by Veer. See Pages: COLLABORATIONS (Bob Cobbing - Robert Sheppard) published in a box by Veer - out now ]