Bob Cobbing | Sonic Icons

Bob Cobbing

Sonic Icons

London, UK: Writers Forum Press, 1970

62 pp., 20.5 x 25.5 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

Sonic Icons is the 9th publication from Writers Forum Press, a group that began meeting in 1952 and continues today, long after the death of Bob Cobbing, its founder. Concerned with the "limits of poetry", the group began publishing in the early sixties. Initially it self-published members writing and later would also publish work by John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, P.J. O'Rourke, Maggie O'Sullivan, Brion Gysin and many others. 

Sonic Icons is a hand-made collection of Cobbing’s typewriter poems, printed on a variety of coloured papers, with a rubber-stamped cover. The book is considered a landmark in Cobbing's work, but also in visual poetry in general - a moment when concrete poetry gestured towards the performative sound poetry. 

The yellow-page poem Beethoven Today, above, is reprinted in the 2015 book BOOOOOK: The Life and Work of Bob Cobbing. 

Already scarce, the provenance of this copy makes it particularly noteworthy - it is signed and dedicated by Cobbing to bpNichol, whose name he misspells:  “For Barry, greetings from Bob, 2 Nov 1970”. 

"Bob Cobbing is a senior and major exponent of the international concrete poetry movement in Great Britain. What is immediately impressive about his large body of work, in comparison with that of other poets in the field, is its range, and the published texts, which are freestanding visual poems, are also scores for vocal performance as sound poems. One of Cobbing's titles, Sonic Icons, stresses the interdependence of the two sides of his work through its appropriate anagram. His division of labor between self-publishing and performance ensures the unity of a creative project of great importance, yet his quest for new materials, techniques, and processes remains undiminished in energy and innovation."

- Robert Sheppard

"The publication of Sonic Icons in 1970 signalled a level of sophistication that was to become a trademark of Cobbing􏰂's visual and sound poetry from that point onwards. It was another pivotal moment for Cobbing􏰂's art."

- Mark Anthony Jackson

"I centre that in Sonic Icons, but one could place it in several other titles—in this case we have the intermediate stages resulting from new properties that Cobbing’s work accreted—for example, the idea of the graphical being readable into utterance; the idea of text on the page as being a landscape."

- Lawrence Upton

"Owning the means of production (the office duplicator, the photocopier) meant that Cobbing could conflate the processes of writing, design and printing. Performing regularly meant that he could heal the split in concrete poetry between those who presented silent icons, most famously Ian Hamilton Finlay, and those who developed the art of pure sound, such as Henri Chopin. Cobbing's anagrammatic title Sonic Icons was emblematic.

[...]

Between 1963 and 2002 Writers' Forum published more than 1,000 pamphlets and books, many of them his own work, but he was also generous as a publisher to younger writers, such as Lee Harwood and Maggie O'Sullivan. He issued texts by John Cage and Allen Ginsberg, and by fellow concrete poets, such Frenchman Pierre Garnier and Italian Arrigo Lora-Totino, both of whom were guests at the workshop in the 1990s."

- The Guardian