"Suddenly Everyone Began Reading Aloud"
A celebration of visual- and sound-poet Bob Cobbing
With support from the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW), Matthew Abess (C'08) spent the duration of Summer 2006 at the Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry researching "concrete text-sound" poetry and in particular the work of innovative writer Bob Cobbing. Abess' research has culminated in two major projects: "Make Perhaps This Out Sense Of Can You;" an exhibition of Cobbing's work at the Rosenwald Gallery of Penn's Van-Pelt Dietrich Library; and "Suddenly Everyone Began Reading Aloud," an evening of readings and discussion in celebration of Cobbing's work and winner of 2007-2008 Kerry Sherin Wright Prize. A text examining the work of Bob Cobbing is to be published in conjunction with the exhibition and symposium.
Photos by John Carroll
Photos by Antonio Macasieb of The Daily Pennsylvanian
Thursday, October 11, 2007
If "Make Perhaps This Out Sense Of Can You" at the Rosenwald Gallery is its eastern enclave, then "Suddenly Everyone Began Reading Aloud" constitutes the west-side annex in a generative cosmology: "Two circles of shooting stars" [Khlebnikov], interwoven by the collaborative ethos palpably realized as the Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry; implementing constellations; probing the limits.
Performance as a distribution of elements:
"The concept of one voice scarcely making use of the physical possibilities of body - almost disembodied - reading with attention only to intellect and syntax to an audience ranged in rows, gives way to a new concept of complex bodily movements and mobile vocal-body sounds in space, - moving in space and sensed in different intensities and from different directions by an audience who may, in the event, become participants, and who may also be scattered in space ..." [Bob Cobbing, 1972]
Hence, a typographical problem:
"the growth of the voice to its full physical powers ... as part of the body, the body as language." [Bob Cobbing, 1970]
Wherefore:
"Communication is primarily a muscular activity ... Say 'soma haoma.' Dull. Say it dwelling on the quality of the sounds. Better. Let it say itself through you. Let it sing itself through you. The vowels have their pitch, the phrase has potential rhythms. You do it with the whole of you, muscular movement, voice, lungs, limbs. Poetry is a physical thing." [Bob Cobbing, 1972]
So then:
"This is a permissive exhibition. We let it be known that there was to be a poetry exhibition and sat back to see what would come in." [Bob Cobbing, from his introduction to the Gala Poetry exhibition in Riverside Terrace, 1969]
 Matt Abess |
 Marvin Sackner |
 Maggie O'Sullivan |
 cris cheek |
 Charles Bernstein |
Dr. Marvin Sackner is a noted pulmonologist, medical researcher, inventor, curator, patron of the arts, collector of word and image and, together with his wife Ruth, founder of the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. "We established the Archive," Dr. Sackner explains, "when we recognized that a global, international, historic perspective appeared to be lacking in museums, libraries and private collections. We decided to fulfill this niche that we had identified, by gathering all works relating to concrete and visual poetry that we could afford to buy, irrespective of personal esthetic considerations, along with their historic antecedents. We wanted to build a comprehensive permanent collection that would not be altered by our personal biases, recognizing the major difficulty in finding distribution sources for visual/verbal works of art and poetry." The Archive has since evolved into a word/image poetic and artistic resource rather than a restricted collection of concrete and visual poetry. The Archive currently collects several hundred artists/poets from all over the world in depth. The holdings of the Archive amount to over 65,000 items.
Maggie O'Sullivan is a British poet, performer and visual artist. For over thirty years, her work has appeared extensively in national and international journals and anthologies and she has performed her work, often in collaboration with dancers and musicians, all over the world. O'Sullivan's work is influenced by Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Beuys, Jerome Rothenberg, Bob Cobbing and Basil Bunting. Her books include An Incomplete Natural History (1984), In the House of the Shaman (1993), Red Shifts (2000) and Palace of Reptiles (2003). In 1996, she edited out of everywhere: An anthology of contemporary linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America and the UK. Body of Work, which brings together for the first time the full texts of O'Sullivan booklets now out of print made during the London-based late 1970's-1980's and includes many Writers Forum publications is out now (Reality Street, 2006). Full online texts of recent work, including all origins are lonely (2003); murmur - tasks of mourning (2004) and courtship of lapwings (2006) are featured on her website, www.maggieosullivan.co.uk
cris cheek, self-described "poet-pedagogue, writer-critic, book artist-publisher, new-media practitioner and interdisciplinary performer," earned his PhD at Lancaster (UK), and has been involved in the creative literary and artistic activities since 1975. cheek works in various spheres of the contemporary art, incorporating a wide range of media-strategies and technologies into his projects. For many years he has developed the ideas of live-art, spontaneous literary performance and "chaotic declamation" on his own and as a member of various musical and poetic groups. cheek is the author of a number of poetry editions and books, including a present (Bluff Books, 1980), mud (Spanner/Open Field, 1984), Cloud Eyes (Microbrigade Ed., 1991), skin upon skin (CD, Sound & Language, 1996), stranger (Sound & Language, 1996), Songs from Navigation (book+CD, Reality Street, 1998) and others. His critical articles include "On Bob Cobbing," (British Electronic Poetry Centre, 2004).
Charles Bernstein is the author of more than twenty books, including My Way: Speeches and Poems, With Strings, and most recently Girly Man, all three of which have been published by the University of Chicago Press. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is co-director of PennSound (writing.upenn.edu/pennsound).