Item #40134 Concerning Concrete Poetry. Bob COBBING, Peter MAYER.

130.

Concerning Concrete Poetry.

London: Slimvolume, 2014. First edition thus. 4to. Perfect bound yellow card wrappers, 134pp. (printed on blue and white paper stock). 95 b/w illustrations.

Introduction by William Cobbing, Rosie Cooper, Andrew Hunt and Fraser Muggeridge. In it, they provide a brief account of the book’s complex gestation and eventual publication - the authors began work on it in 1971, but it was not published by Writers Forum until 1978, though various unauthorised, usually photocopied versions of the work in progress appeared in the intervening years. This facsimile edition by Fraser Muggeridge Studio was published to coincide with ‘Bob Jubilé’, a celebration of Bob Cobbing’s legacy.

The book consists of a compilation of statements, manifestos and chronologies of concrete, visual and sound poetries, together with numerous illustrations and detailed bibliographies and discographies. It includes the history of the word ‘concrete’, semantic poetry, and ‘concrete renewal’, numerous examples of work by Henri Chopin, Brion Gysin, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Ernst Jandl, Franz Mon, John Furnival, Emmett Williams and many others, related texts by Guillaume Apollinaire, Lewis Carroll and Man Ray, and precursors such as Rabelais’ ‘Bottle Oracle’, Giambattista Palatino’s ‘Sonetto Figurato’, and Arabic Kufic calligraphy.

Fine. One of 500 copies.

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