Ode To Gravity:
Bob Cobbing

One of the best known sound poets in the world, Bob Cobbing is a dynamic gentleman with a sonorous voice and lovely accent, who was a poet, performer, and composer of text-sound compositions. Cobbing also was a producer and collector of concrete or visual poetry, and his bookstore, Better Books of London was a leading distribution point for avant-garde poets during the 1960s and 70s. In this program, recorded in 1972, Cobbing talks about his early work as a teacher and later as a publisher of visual poetry, as well as his opinions about the field of sound poetry. You will hear a selection of his sound poems and an engaging interview recorded in Cobbing’s home as he talked with Charles Amirkhanian. Bob Cobbing died in 2002 at the age of 82.