BOB COBBING ON ORCOMBE.COM

I went to the letterpress workshop in Plymouth yesterday to print the Orcombe.com edition of Bob Cobbing's wonderful poem 'Wan Do Tree'. I really like the practical process of printing, working with the machinery to make something beautiful, and it's a special pleasure to work on a Cobbing piece. Each print day requires planning and preparation, trying out various design ideas and then working out what can actually be done with the equipment and available type. There are other people working in the print shop on completely different projects and I couldn't get anything done there without the 'old school' printer technician Paul Collier who runs the place. So it is in various ways a collaborative effort. The photo above shows the type for 'Wan Do Tree' set up in my favourite press, furniture clamping the composition in place, with ink-charged rollers ready to go. The colour is called boysenberry and it looks rich on Somerset satin paper.
     My first experience of printing machinery was learning to print on an offset litho machine in the basement of the Poetry Society, this was at Earls Court Square (London) in the early seventies, and it was Bob Cobbing who taught me how to print. The machine was used for the large format Poetry Review edited by Eric Mottram and it was possible to print there just by asking if you had the front. I made some pamphlets and sold them door to door in South London. I also learnt silkscreen on very home-made equipment about the same time. Bob printed some of his Writers Forum books there as well as Poetry Review, and used the printing process for direct composition, just as he did on mimeo and later on a photocopier. There's an excellent piece by Lawrence Upton on Bob Cobbing here.

'Wan Do Tree' is copyright (c) Bob Cobbing 1977. I'm grateful to the Bob Cobbing estate for permission to make my new edition which is available only at Orcombe.com

WIRING WITTGENSTEIN

I was at this high speed colloquium, chaired and introduced by Regenia Gagnier, on Thursday 12 June 2014 to show some recent work and give a brief talk. The speakers were John Dupre, Meaning as Use;  Aron Vinegar, 'What is the logical form of that?' Wittgenstein, Gesture and the Arts; Jaime Robles, Verbal Entanglements: The physical aspects of language and its digitisation; Mike Rose-Steel, Tweeting the Roman de la Rose: digitisation, social media and constraints; Tony Lopez, 'This is a forensic sentence'; Suzanne Steele, Northern Exposure: digital transparency, embeddedness and the Canadian war artist; Richard Carter, Performing the Algorithm: Engagements with Digital Literature.
     Great to see so many Exeter people there including Lewis expert Alan Munton, the curator Cristina Burke-Trees, and Martyn Windsor from CCANW. Thanks to Jaime Robles and Mike Rose-Steel for inviting me to speak and for organising the event. The meeting was to explore future collaborative projects in philosophy, art, technology, english, hopefully right across the spectrum.

NEVERMORE

I just got a copy of my latest publication Nevermore from ZimZalla run by Tom Jenks. This is a standing poem in the form of a zigzag folding card with a silkscreen text printed on both sides. A tribute to the poet Robert Creeley, the text in full is a variation on the statement 'form is never more than an extension of content' attributed to Creeley by Charles Olson in his 1950 essay 'Projective Verse'. My poem is designed as a portable Creeley memorial, alluding also to Olson and (because of the title) further back to that pioneer of American poetics Edgar Allen Poe. Ideally this piece would be made in wood and fabric and installed as a free standing folding screen with a face size of just under six foot square.
The folding card is 350 gsm Antalis Perfect Image printed by Handbench Screenprint.

The black side of the sleeve cover is letterpress printed in three kinds of Univers type and the red side is a purpose-made ZimZalla rubber stamp, both on 300 gsm Somerset printmaking paper. This is a hand made edition of 40 copies available only from ZimZalla.

LETTERPRESS PRINTING IN PLYMOUTH

Exmouth from the train at Starcross

I got an early train to Plymouth University on Tuesday to take part in a letterpress printing induction in the Faculty of Arts Scott Building, with writers Anthony Caleshu, Angela Szczepaniak and Jamie Popowich. The three-hour workshop was run by Paul Collier -- a printer, technician and teacher who is in charge of the outstanding type collection located in Plymouth. There is a large range of lead and wood types which are no longer manufactured commercially. I understand that the collection is of national importance, there is certainly no other collection like it in the region. So it was a privilege to have a demonstration of how type is composed and how some of the different kinds of printing machinery work. We set our names and some lines of type and they were combined into a column that we each got to print on good quality paper. It came out OK for a first try, the feel of the impression on inked paper does it for me, beautiful. My first books were pulp novels printed letterpress by NEL in the early 1970s and I saw each one first in a heap of galleys with I think three pages on each long sheet, very different from the current digital print.
    I'm hoping to get some new work made in letterpress over the next few weeks.

The printshop at Plymouth University

NEON WORK EXHIBITED IN BURY, MANCHESTER

Still on show at Bury Art Museum (5th October 2013 to 1 February 2014) is the exhibition Time for Light which comprises works by Grazia Toderi, Brass Art and Tony Lopez.
Grazia Toderi's video installation Atlante Rosso (2012), a huge disc of revolving lights accompanied by machine-like sounds, seems to be based on night time illuminated cityscapes seen from the air. Brass Art's new installation of The Air That Held Them is three large fabric heads that slowly inflate and individually collapse, filling up the main gallery and creating a strange spooky atmosphere. My neon Are We Not All Palestinian?, manufactured in Manchester in 2012, is shown for the first time in a gallery with Trespass a neon piece in a suitcase by Brass Art.

BOB COBBING ABC IN SOUND

On 8th October I went to the opening of Bob Cobbing: ABC in Sound, curated by William Cobbing and Rosie Cooper at the Exhibition Research Centre, Liverpool John Moores University. This is an exhibition about the whole career of the leading British concrete and sound poet, virtuoso performer, publisher, poetry activist, teacher and intermedia artist Bob Cobbing (1920-2002). The exhibition features recordings going back to the 1960s and 70s, lots of publications and printed works, framed artworks, and works by some of his collaborators such as Dom Sylvester Houedard, Henri Chopin, and his wife Jennifer Pike. There are also documents relating to his activities as an arts and poetry activist, and to his early career as a teacher. Apart from the sheer compression and brilliance of his best work (see above, read it aloud), Cobbing was an influential poet and artist who inspired a whole generation through his generous workshops, performances and work as a publisher. It was a pleasure to see this show and have the many aspects of Cobbing's career sampled and effectively shown together, some of the best visual works reprinted and shown in large format. A new film by artist Holly Antrum presents Jennifer Pike's dance performance work. This was my first visit to the Exhibitions Research Centre in the John Lennon Art and Design Building, next to the Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool. Thanks to Robert Sheppard and Patricia Farrell for their kind hospitality.
Image: 'wan, do, tree' from the Exhibition flyer, copyright (c) 1977 by Bob Cobbing, courtesy the Estate of Bob Cobbing.

BOOKBINDING WORKSHOP IN PLYMOUTH

I went to a great bookbinding workshop run by Tom O'Reilly at Plymouth College of Art on Thursday 31 October. This event was part of the Plymouth International Book Festival. I made two bound books from scratch in a day: one casebound in maroon bookcloth with marker, headbands, shiny endpapers and vellum laid pages, another a Coptic binding in blue and white. Tom O'Reilly the bookbinder is a great teacher -- everyone in the class made their own books. His own work is really various and interesting, lots of detailed embossed leather bindings, displayed on his website (see the Gallery) here.