In a 1973 interview with Eric Mottram, the British sound and concrete poet Bob Cobbing (1920–2002) comments: ‘English is almost an international language now, but my poetry is probably more international’ (Mottram, 1977: 16). Rather than being a gesture of self-importance, this is a characteristically humorous acknowledgement of his poetry’s tendency to exceed the semantic structures of any single language, whether in degraded typographic scores, visceral sound performances, or the unstable connection between the two. Cobbing’s commitment to poetry’s material forms extended to shared practices of performance and publishing, as well as a decentring of creativity that disrupted boundaries between languages and art forms, and between poets and audiences. In the same interview, Cobbing describes his vision of the poetry reading:

But I have the idea that you should have a different kind of poetry reading altogether, where you have a poem, which maybe the poet has thought up—he has the school for it perhaps. Or he has an idea for it, maybe a minimal idea—but it is there for everybody to come into. It is an area in which everybody can join and, hopefully, if you have time, it can go on so that the poet can almost sort of step outside it, the group are no longer audience, they are performers, they’re almost poets, they’re creating things in their own right, they can carry the thing on (Mottram, 1977: 16).

What, though, are the ‘things’ created, or the ‘thing’ that can be carried on? Central to Central to Cobbing’s neo-avant-garde practice is an interest in shared sound that is not contained by a singular text or speaker, in which the practice exceeds individuals just as it exceeds a particular art form. This is as true of his Writers Forum workshops as of his many collaborations with musicians and artists, for example with Hugh Metcalfe and others in the performance group Birdyak. His idea of ‘the thing’ does not dispense with the poet as creative originator; what the poet originates is a process rather than a completed expression, and the process is one that enables the creative expression of others. The ‘verbivocovisual’ expression of concrete poetry, as defined by Cobbing’s Brazilian contemporaries Haroldo and Augusto de Campos and Decio Pignatari, ‘shares the advantages of nonverbal communication, without giving up the word’s virtualities’ (Campos, Campos and Pignatari, 1970: 71), and in such work there is a fluid relationship between semantic possibility, visual score and sound that overspills any given language. The ‘thing’ is not the poem as text, and neither is it ‘poetry’ in the abstract sense of heightened emotion that it is often taken to be in general parlance, yet experimental poetry in performance enables community and dissent, belonging and strangeness in ways that can often elude criticism of the poem as a linguistic object. While Cobbing refers here to the poetry reading as a specific event, the collective approaches to performance and dissemination he developed though Writers Forum, from the 1950s onwards, enabled others to ‘carry the thing on’ in new contexts and across languages.

It is not my intention here to provide an account of all the different iterations of Writers Forum in the UK, which has existed in several versions (sometimes simultaneously) during and after Cobbing’s lifetime, continuing to this day. Given the constraints of this article, I will explore one particular transcultural and translingual dynamic that Cobbing set in motion through examples from the work of some of those involved in it. Chilean poet Martín Gubbins was a 30-year-old English Literature Masters student at University College London (UCL) with a background in law when he first encountered Writers Forum in 2001. Actively involved in the London group for two years, he subsequently returned to Santiago de Chile where he co-founded Foro de Escritores, a Chilean replication of the Writers Forum structure. Challenging the notion of the individual artist, Luna Montenegro from Chile and Adrian Fisher from London have worked together as montenegrofisher, a two-person poetry, art and performance collective, since their meeting in 2000, participating in both Writers Forum and Foro de Escritores. The longevity of the connections forged through these groupings, and the importance of the social space from which they emerged, became evident in the weekly collective series Language is à Virus, hosted on Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 by Felipe Cussen in Santiago and Martín Bakero in Paris, who led a further transformation as they enabled new approaches to sound poetry performance online.

Voice and embodiment in anglophone performance poetry are often understood in relation to the individual artist addressing an audience. The website of the UK’s leading promoter of performance poetry, Apples and Snakes (n.d.), states its mission as follows: ‘By bringing together important voices in interesting ways, we create inspiring experiences for audiences. We champion the development of extraordinary artists’. This individual emphasis accompanies a commitment to community, in which the ‘extraordinary’ artist, whether a well-known figure or previously ‘unheard’, is able to voice collective feeling or opinion, inspiring the audience through skilful mobilizing of affect. In what follows, I will consider an alternative perspective that is internationally significant to an extent not always fully recognized in the UK. The critical spaces of avant-garde or experimental poetry in performance are not lacking in extraordinary individuals or inspiring experiences, but they rely on a more plural framing of the relationship between artists and communities. This in turn enables collective practices that generate new forms of community, rather than responding to a community that is already understood to exist. Cobbing’s imagined poetry reading, in which the audience become performers, reflects a sense that the artist is not extraordinary, but that the capacity for shared creation is common to all, and that creative agency is distributed instead of being possessed by one person. Cobbing’s poetry and his organization of events and publications, in dialogue with international currents of neo-avant-garde practice, has in turn enabled connections across languages, extending a notion of community beyond the national framing that often constrains the discussion of poetry, as a language-based art form usually perceived as being situated within a single language. His experimental work and ethos, in enabling the crossing of linguistic and cultural borders, invites a reading of British poetry performance as one full of complex and overlapping relations. Apples and Snakes, for example, hosted performances in 1987 by Cobbing and his collaborators that were subsequently featured on released recordings (Birdyak, 1988a; Birdyak, 1988b), indicating a history of permeable spaces in London’s performance scene that allowed encounters between different areas of practice, despite the polarities evident in publishing (Sheppard, 2005). Cobbing’s collective interdisciplinarity emerged from this context with important potential for the global future of sound poetry and its communities.

From Futurism and Dada onwards, sound poetry erupts in a clash of forms, whether visual score, chaotic typography or the sonic encounter of different languages; at the break in signifying systems, it makes that break audible. The collision of multiple languages in Dada is exemplified in Richard Huelsenbeck’s Marcel Janko’s and Tristan Tzara’s ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’, in which the overlay of languages is what produces disruptive noise (Rothenberg and Joris, 1995: 308), as I have discussed elsewhere (Skoulding, 2020b). Cobbing has said that he was not, early on in his life, aware of these early experiments, but began as a painter with a synaesthesic appreciation of the relation between image and sound (Sutherland, 2001). It was contact with French sound poetry, particularly that of François Dufrêne, Henri Chopin and Bernard Heidsieck in the 1960s, that brought awareness of his specific connection with avant-garde networks. Ideas and techniques may well have filtered through multiple sources, including via Brion Gysin, though David Toop writes that Cobbing was experimenting with cut-ups in 1956, three years before William Burroughs and Gysin published theirs (2019: 165). Cross-pollinations across art forms and across languages are often aspects of the same process, one which I have previously described as ‘expanded translation’ (Skoulding, 2020a), but Sarah Dowling’s term ‘translingual poetics’, developed in her exploration of lyric personhood in contemporary American poetry, makes helpfully pointed use of the term ‘translingual’ in her critique of neoliberal multilingualism (Dowling, 2018). Resisting the smooth flow of global communication that facilitates capitalism—for example the ease with which Google will translate one language to another—the translingual, as she frames it, draws critical attention to what is at stake in the power relations between languages.

Poetry communities, like any other kind of community, run the risk of overdetermining themselves in the sense Jean-Luc Nancy observes, drawing attention to the dangers of community when it is imagined as a fusion of individuals, a ‘we’ that becomes a singular entity by excluding others. He argues that, instead, the communal is a pre-existing condition, not just of humans but of all entities, and that ‘being-with’ is starting point for the discovery not of subjectivity but of a plural singularity (Nancy, 2000). This vision is complemented by his writing on listening and timbre, in which the Ancient Greek concept of methexis locates the question of community in a participatory performance context (Nancy, 2007). In order to develop this idea I will draw on a contrasting line of thought, combining Nancy’s ontological concerns and his emphasis on listening and reception with a focus on practice. Recent interest in pragmatism, as applied in poetry criticism and in sound studies (Middleton, 2021; Keylin, 2023), has revealed its relevance to experimental poetry and participatory sound art, as well as potential for extending forms of community to the non-human world. The pragmatist philosopher John Dewey explores the imbrication of artistic practice and ritual in everyday life (2005: 6), defining art as ‘a quality of doing’ (222), while his emphasis on experience insists on the materiality and interrelatedness of its forms. What does poetry do in performance, and how does it enable the generative autonomy described in Cobbing’s remarks? He is not suggesting that the poem has an abstract autonomy in any metaphysical way; his interest is in a material process that has, as I will show, aesthetic, social and political dimensions. What enables the ‘thing’ to carry on exceeds the figure of the artist, a fact to which Cobbing was always alert. The distributed creativities that can be seen in his practice are drawn from his interactions with larger international communities, and they are themselves generative: forms of performance that preceded him and which continue to inform new work. In discussing participatory sound art, Keylin has usefully highlighted the relevance of James Gibson’s notion of ‘affordance’, drawn from ecological psychology, and Caroline Levine’s application of the term to forms, which ‘afford possibilities to be acted upon’ (Keylin, 2023: 58). In the light of Brandon LaBelle’s emphasis on the relationality of sound (2015), he observes the ‘affordance for connectivity’ offered by sound (Keylin, 2023: 71). I am suggesting here that this is at the heart of Cobbing’s practice.

‘Performance’, related to poetry, has a range of meanings in English that is subtly different from its use in Spanish, where it is more specifically related to avant-garde practice and post-Beat performance poetry. In English, ‘performance’ is broader, and may simply mean an oral interpretation of a written text. I am discussing sound poetry, not in its strictest sense of poetry made only of sound rather than words, but, following Dick Higgins, as poetry in which sound is at the forefront (Carrasco, Cussen and Robinson, 2023), or as a ‘performance intermedium’ in which ‘sound for its own sake becomes the principle expressive medium, sometimes even at the expense of lexical sense’ (Higgins, 1993: 1182). At the same time, I have in mind Robert Sheppard’s explorations of form in innovative poetry (2016), in turn influenced by Derek Attridge and the ‘act-event’ of reading (2015). Performance has a theatrical sense, but Schechner’s understanding of ‘showing doing’ is more relevant for thinking about how poetry reveals process (1988). The movement of poetry across forms is part of performance, a word that in English is still haunted by its now obsolete meanings ‘to bring about, effect’, and to ‘construct’ (Onions, 1966). In this article I will consider the ways in which performance returns poetry to the voice, bringing about and constructing collective spaces.

Cobbing’s emphasis on sound and concrete poetry, linking him to communities in Brazil, Canada, Sweden and France, yet also located in an English working-class perspective, could not have been further removed from the UK poetry mainstream of the 1960s, which was still largely under the anti-modernist influence of Philip Larkin and other Movement poets. However, Cobbing was active in underground networks that would have a far-reaching impact. London was pivotal in transatlantic relationships, and as manager at Better Books from January 1965 to October 1967, he was centrally involved. This was where Allen Ginsberg gave a reading in May 1965, in advance of the International Poetry Incarnation organized by Michael Horovitz at the Royal Albert Hall on June 11th of that year, which ushered in a new, post-Beat sense of what a poetry reading could be. With an audience of 7,000 and a transatlantic line-up, it marked a point at which ‘underground’ poetry in performance became highly visible. For the loose grouping of poets that Mottram would name the British Poetry Revival, the ‘revival’ of poetry came through a post-Poundian engagement with late American modernism, particularly Ginsberg and Charles Olson, for whom the musicality of spoken language was central to the process of composition. Outside London, these transatlantic energies were reverberating in different ways in Cambridge and Essex, where the universities were important points of connection, and in Newcastle, where the Morden Tower reading series was already providing an emphasis on orality from a northern perspective under the influence of Basil Bunting. Beyond the fermentations of the mid-1960s poetry scene, Cobbing was connected with intermedia practices through Fluxus, and was on the Honorary Committee of the Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966, instigated by Gustav Metzger (Cobbing and Cooper, 2015: 118). A Fluxus emphasis on process and immediate experience remained a continuing trait in Cobbing’s work, bringing the anglophone poetry reading into contact with other kinds of performance. Like the American poet and translator Jerome Rothenberg, he drew on the shamanic vocal techniques of oral poetry along with its reconceptualization, through the lens of conceptual art, as a performance situation with radical potential (Rothenberg, 1967: xxix).

Sheppard, writing in 2005, outlines the rich network of international influences to which Cobbing’s work responded, confirming his place as a ‘senior and major exponent of the concrete poetry movement’ (Sheppard, 2005: 214), and relating his work in visual and sounded forms to that of the Brazilian Noigandres group, Lettrism, Russian ‘zaum’ poetry, Kurt Schwitters, Ernst Jandl, Swedish text-sound poet Sten Hanson, London-based Polish surrealist Stefan Themerson and the poésie sonore of French poets François Dufrêne and Henri Chopin, who lived in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s (214–232). However, Sheppard emphasizes the difference of Cobbing’s British perspective, quoting his remark that ‘Whenever I turn to non-verbal sounds, Chopin welcomes me with open arms! … but I go back to the word again and they tell me the word is finished’ (Mottram, 1977). While highlighting Cobbing’s separation from French sound poetry, Sheppard argues for the sustained importance of linguistically innovative poetry in the UK, in which Cobbing is positioned as a key figure, and amplifies the contribution of the British Poetry Revival as a set of approaches and relationships in its own right, rather than a reaction against Movement poetry. Peter Barry’s characterization of the ‘Poetry Wars’ of the 1970s (2006) further underscores the British significance of Cobbing’s work as a modernist resistance to more conservative approaches, showing what was at stake in the struggle for control of the National Poetry Society, and in the Arts Council’s punitive reaction.

These histories and critical appraisals have usefully highlighted distinctive traditions of experimental British poetry, but recent work, such as Greg Thomas’ Border Blurs, has located Cobbing’s work more internationally (2019). This is important in underscoring the relationships across languages to which his work responds, and within which it has subsequently resonated. In discussion of Cobbing’s ‘C’ poem from Sound Poems (1965), Thomas notes that it is dedicated to Chopin, and although it differs from Chopin’s complete breaking down of semantic meaning, the use of French is dominant (Thomas, 2019: 219). Listening to a recording of the poem reveals the extent to which Cobbing is able to inhabit different languages, hearing English as inflected by French:

Cri zok cri zok cri zok

Rinkle stammen rinkel stammen

Tak tak tak tak

Gros temps gros temps gros

Temps temps temps tempe

Temps terre temps terre

Plume de ma tante

Tu dors tu dors

To two too door

A door adore

Toc toc toc toc

Tu dors tu dors

Zzzzzz Zzzzzz

Z (Cobbing, 2015)

In Cobbing’s 1965 recording of this poem (2009), the distinctiveness of the sound comes from the shifting between languages, as well as the play in French between ‘temps’ (time/weather) and ‘tempe’ (temple), which relies on accurate pronunciation to bring out the subtle difference in sound, even though the semantic meaning does not seem important. On the one hand, this sounds like the French language sonically inhabited by a competent speaker, but on the other, the phrase ‘Plume de ma tante’, well known as an example of pointless language-learning exercises, creates a comic and ironic distance from French, especially given what would have been the relatively recent resonance of the 1955 musical comedy named after it. The humour is not derived from mocking French, so much as a kind of self-mockery, an undermining and refusal of linguistic virtuosity, which is not, after all, the point. This playful mobility of tone and approach is reflected in Cobbing’s comments to Mottram:

I’m a lousy at languages. I have an acquaintance with a fairly large number of languages, but the only other language I can speak even badly, I think, is French. A little bit of Swedish but not enough…. My whole attitude to poetry could almost be summed up as a misuse of the elements…. I can misuse elements of other languages to my own creative purpose (Mottram, 1977: 17).

Cobbing’s inclination to preserve meaningful—but displaced—elements of language rather than pursue the purely non-verbal is central to his post-Dada poetics of ‘misuse’, and it has subsequently been liberating to poets and performers for whom English is a vital medium but not a native language.

A collaborative recording by Cobbing and Dufrêne in 1968, ‘Slowly slowly the tongue unrolls’, is built around a back and forth improvisation between French and English, with both poets speaking simultaneously in either language as they find resonances in each other’s names, discover jokes in the resulting Franglais like ‘un oeuf is enough’ and play with association and onomatopoeia as in ‘cocorico’. There is laughter in the background and the chink of glasses; it is a joyously silly exchange that gradually reaches a sonorous pitch with a glancing reference to Gertrude Stein’s ‘Sacred Emily’ (Stein, 1922: 178–88):

la langue langue a tongue a longer tongue a longer tongue a longer tongue a longer tongue it’s been a long time long time longtemps longtemps longtemps lentement lentement lentement lentement slowly slowly the tongue unrolls unrolls unrolls unrolls slowly the tongue unrolls rolls rosy roll a rose a rose rose is a rose is a rose is a roll

(Cobbing and Dufrêne, 1968)

Cobbing’s embrace of the sound of other languages, whether fully mastered or not, connected him with international communities of sound poetry performance, while providing an expanded palette of sounds and techniques for other poets, a way of being in English that decentred its authority and monolithic status. In this context, Cobbing’s work continues to resound not as a specifically English oeuvre, but one in which the English language is coincidentally at hand, like the photocopier, as an improvisatory tool.

Cobbing’s own voice in performance was shaped by an English working-class masculine identity, but his approach to the collective, whether internationally, locally, or with his wife and collaborator Jennifer Pike Cobbing, responded to—and generated—a sense of poetry as a communal medium, a material practice, and a process which exists in a collective and self-sustaining structure. Scott Thurston has highlighted the significance of Pike’s contribution, observing that it is ‘partly the success and visibility of Cobbing’s work … that has contributed to the relative obscurity of Pike’s output’, also quoting Lawrence Upton, another close collaborator of Cobbing’s, who described the ‘shared commitment in practice’ he saw between Cobbing and Pike (2021). Cobbing’s idea of a poetry reading as an ‘area in which everybody can join’, and one that the poet might then step away from, is typical of many his statements that frame poetry as an embodied and kinetic practice; as Thurston has shown, this perspective was clearly in dialogue with Pike’s work as a dancer. The decentred poetry reading, in which the audience become participating performers, is one in which the singular lyric consciousness gives way to collective expression. This was manifested in collaborative performance that drew its approach from free improvisation, for example the music and poetry group Birdyak with Lol Coxhill and Hugh Metcalfe from 1985 to 2002 at venues including The Klinker and Betsy Trotwood pubs in North London, as well as the aforementioned Snakes and Apples. Thurston highlights the significant though sometimes overlooked contribution of Jennifer Pike to this project, as, wearing masks and costumes she had made herself, she would dance to improvised music, spoken word and vocalization, sometimes contributing vocals (Thurston, 2021). Another of Cobbing’s frequent collaborators, Paula Claire, articulates the importance of plural voices in her sleeve notes for Konkrete Canticle’s recordings made with Cobbing and Michael Chant: ‘All my poems are for the audience to improvise with the poet so that the power and magic of language is experienced as a communal right/rite’ (Chant et al., 1971). Her comment shows how the merging of voices in performance speaks to both ritual and political traditions of using language in communal spaces; the creative affordance offered to participants is a route to finding a political voice rather than individual self-expression.

The collaborative space in which Cobbing’s influence has been most far-reaching was the Writers Forum workshop. Its formation was cross-disciplinary, since it was originally a writing branch of an art group (Group H), and Jeff Nuttall’s early involvement reflected his and Cobbing’s poetry and art collaborations as teachers working in the same secondary school (Moore, 2007). While the workshop reflects a pedagogy, it was one in which, as in his ideal poetry reading, Cobbing’s aim was not to take a position of leadership but for the group to gain its own momentum. Supportive, collective and participatory (if often male-dominated), his workshops introduced new generations to avant-garde practices, and to the burgeoning post-Beat influence of US poetry. Their innovation was a focus on performance as the central developmental tool, rather than the critical unpicking of meaning and linguistic effects. In a 2001 interview, Cobbing explains how this came about:

In the early days several of the members fancied themselves as critics. They would pull the poets to pieces, telling them how things should be done. That didn’t appeal to me very much at all because everything I did was thoroughly criticized. I really didn’t regard myself as a writer in those days. I was a painter, yes, I wasn’t a writer … However, over the years the workshop has developed and now we have no criticism whatsoever. The point about criticism is that it is frequently wrong. I think one can dispense with it and learn through example. Today, people read their work out loud and they learn by performing it whether it’s any good or not. They can respect the attitude of the other people around them and can more or less tell whether the work is any good that way. But the days when we were criticizing each other’s work, I don’t think that was a very good idea at all. I’m dead set against that now (Sutherland, 2001).

Cobbing’s approach was diametrically opposed to what was (and remains) typical of most poetry workshops, where work in progress is shared and suggestions offered for its development as a written text. Shaped by anglophone pedagogies and literary criticism, ‘workshop culture’ is a structure that carries with it liberal democratic ideologies, as Eric Bennett has shown, focusing on the expression of the interior private life of the individual rather than communal or political contexts (Bennett, 2015). In its focus on individual ownership of writing, the traditional writing workshop tends to reinforce linguistic and aesthetic norms within a given language, particularly English, in which it has been the prevalent model. What Cobbing describes instead is a situation in which the performance of reading poetry aloud is a means of forming the poem through interaction with listeners, and it is no coincidence that Sheppard’s understanding of form illuminates this process so clearly, since he himself was a member of Writers Forum (Sheppard, 2016). Performance enabled the development of new forms by applying the techniques of reading aloud to texts created with visual means, whether concrete or cut-up. The visual noise of ‘dirty’ concrete poetry was translated into an exploration of the sonorous and expressive range of the human voice, while appropriated text was fully inhabited as sound. The workshops were linked to an energetic output of small press publications, often ephemeral. Arnaud Desjardin recalls: ‘There seemed to be a political project around transmission, communication and being with people, rather than Bob making a name for himself’ (Cobbing and Cooper, 2015: 38). This emphasis on community and communication as integral to artistic production, as being an extension of the poem, clarifies the achievement of Writers Forum and a print legacy founded on open, performative interactions rather than the hierarchies typically reinforced by literary culture. Desjardin comments on how Cobbing was ‘totally invested in ideas of immediacy and directness. You do it because it’s now, it’s now, it’s now…’ (Cobbing and Cooper, 2015: 40). The key aspect of the ‘now’ is to see the printed page not as an end in itself but as a pretext for performance, so that poetry is returned to the body, to presence, and to relations with others.

While Writers Forum continues to the present in the UK, there has also been a striking geographical and cross-cultural transfer of its ideas and principles. The combination of Cobbing’s underpinning internationalist perspective, his background as an artist, an aesthetics of ‘misuse’ of language, the decentred creativity of workshops and an atmosphere in which collaboration was the norm provided a particular creative affordance for the Chilean poets Andrés Anwandter, Martín Gubbins and Luna Montenegro, who all attended Writers Forum in London in the early 2000s, along with Martín Bakero who frequently visited from Paris. Anwandter, already well recognized in Chile before his arrival in the UK, continued—and continues to this day—to maintain a strong publication profile in Spanish. For Gubbins, Writers Forum was the catalyst for the beginning of his poetic practice, which remains strongly marked by his time in London. For Montenegro, working with her collaborator Adrian Fisher, the Forum supported the emergence of a bilingual approach.

For these poets, the Forum’s focus on the sonic and visual materiality turned their second-language English into a strength, giving them a distance from semantic and representational uses of language that could be explored to powerful effect. In an interview, Gubbins remembers:

Writers Forum was about gathering and presenting your work aloud on a Saturday afternoon every fortnight or so. There were a couple of exceptions, for example I remember once Lawrence Upton brought large paintings he was working on and didn’t perform them, but almost everything was read aloud or performed somehow. It was mandatory in a subtle way. And the challenge of how to do this with my first visual pieces was the open door for sound exploration—how to read something without a predetermined reading code. My use of sound emerged as a way of interpreting and performing visual work, often of an abstract nature. In my case, at the beginning was the image, then the sound and the performance… I recognized language as a thing, from the point of view of a foreigner. Not having the burden of a mother tongue left me free to do whatever I wanted with how language sounded and how it looked, and I started to do things that no native English speaker would have done (Skoulding, 2021).

Gubbins’ London Poems (2001–2003) (2009), made at this time and self-published, then collected and published later by Writers Forum, reveal the fermentation of this process at work. The poems respond to Gubbins’ walks in London, some of them derived from graffiti or, in the sequence ‘Photo Labs’ made from photographed text, with reference to Situationist practices. Some of the visual poems reflect the urban environment, and are often map-like or playfully mimetic, reflecting the movement of traffic or the density of rain; others make use of handwriting or typography to decompose letters into new forms. Where words are used, they are in English, reflecting a verbal environment experienced in English, as well as the urban interests of the Writers Forum spin-off group London Under Construction, involving Aodhán McCardle, Piers Hugill and Stephen Mooney as well as Gubbins. The title of the final piece, ‘Adjectives for 3 Voices’, gestures towards performance, and is dedicated to: ‘my friends of the Writers Forum, to whom this poem belongs, litera(ri)lly speaking’. The first voice is that of the author, the second is made of adjectives from Blake’s Songs of Innocence, and the third from Songs of Experience. The poem is laid out in five columns on a page in landscape orientation. In the first two is the collaged authorial voice, and as in the other poems it circles back to the weather and details of the urban landscape with its ‘wet pavements, loose bricks’. The other two voices are distributed across the page in the remaining three columns: the second, the third, and then both together. In this way, the text emphasizes the spatial concerns of the poem as a representation of the city, and the spatiality of a performance split between speakers, voicing the ghostly presence of Blake’s poems; it occupies a mid-point between the performance of walking the city in the company of the living and dead, and the performance of the poem as a communal act. The revolutionary potential in this re-animation of Blake’s language through sound reflects the politics of Writers Forum, which was also at this time the crucible for Sean Bonney’s practice, as Steve Willey has shown by drawing out the connection between the radical strangeness of Cobbing’s sound poetry and the revolutionary poetics it subsequently enabled in Bonney’s work (2022). Gubbins’ visual poem ‘S-A-N-T-I-A-G-O’ connects his London soundscapes with Chilean politics: the dates written out across the page begin with the 1541 founding of Santiago by the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia and ends in 1990 with the end of Pinochet’s rule (Gubbins, 2009). Gubbins’ textual link between the two cities reveals the politics inherent in the defamiliarizing strategies of visual and sound poetry, where remapping, re-sounding and inventing new codes is a challenge to existing structures.

The anti-capitalist commitments of visual poetry and its networks were sharply articulated in Latin American mail art, which Gubbins discovered through Writers Forum on Lawrence Upton’s recommendation of the Uruguayan poet Clemente Padín. Padín, whose contribution to Latin American mail art had been foundational, wrote the preface for Gubbins’ first book, Álbum, published in Chile in 2005. Through Padín, Gubbins discovered the work of Edgardo Antonio Vigo from Argentina and the exiled Chilean visual poet Guillermo Deisler, finding ways to relate his own experimentation in London to a Latin American context (Skoulding, 2021). On his return to Santiago in 2003, Gubbins and others set about creating a direct translation of Writers Forum, the Foro de Escritores, with the aim of replicating the collective experience of shared sound and visual poetry, drawing on the international contacts of Chilean poets, artists and musicians. Felipe Cussen, a musician, poet and critic, had encountered sound poetry in Barcelona via Eduard Escoffet and his Proposta festival; Gregorio Fontén had studied music in London, while Chilean visual artist Anamaría Briede sent dispatches from Berlin, including voice recordings on CD and drawings. Gubbins recalls her as a ghostly presence from afar, and her distant involvement signals the importance of developing and maintaining connections internationally (Skoulding, 2021). Bakero provided a link with the poetry scene in Paris. They would meet on Saturday afternoons from 2003 to 2010 in the Bar Rapa Nui, to share without critique, and with the expectation that all those attending would have something to present. As was the case with Writers Forum, there were usually more men in attendance than women, though Jèssica Pujol Duran has highlighted the significance of women’s involvement in both groups in shaping their trajectory (2021). Meeting every three weeks to present new work, the group developed a programme of publication and public performance, based on Cobbing’s example but adjusted to the environment of Santiago, particularly in the more exacting production standards of its printed works. Far from simply importing a European model, the Foro de Escritores in Santiago can be seen in terms of a diverse history of experimentation ranging from Latin American concrete poetry to Argentinian mail art and including key figures such as Padín. It drew on a tradition in Chilean poetry stretching back to Vicente Huidobro’s visual poetry of the early twentieth century, Huidobro himself being a poet whose work took shape between Santiago and Paris.

What made the Foro de Escritores significant in its Chilean context was, according to poet and critic Fernando Pérez Villalón, not only its approach to poetry ‘in expansion’, encompassing visual and performative aspects, but also its open, experimental and intergenerational emphasis on a process of aesthetic research, rather than self-promotion (2024: 447). In the context of Villalón’s discussion of Chilean poetry up to 2020, this observation is in contrast with his account of the Novísima group or ‘new Chilean poetry’ that emerged in the same period, which he sees as founded on a rejection of the previous generation, the group having adopted competitive strategies that tended to perpetuate exactly the kind of neoliberal thinking that its poems denounced (423). Meanwhile, the Foro de Escritores was founded on relations that more consistently informed its practice, outcomes and legacy. By not being a movement, but a set of collective acts and enquiries inspired by Cobbing’s approach, it could, as Villalón reveals, galvanize new directions while sustaining continuities with a Latin American past.

El Foro funcionó a la manera de lo Ezra Pound llamaba un vórtice, una convergencia de energías intensificadas que producen síntesis renovadoras en las que se condensan los rasgos de una época y se anuncian nuevas posibilidades por venir.

The Foro functioned as what Ezra Pound called a vortex, a convergence of intensified energies that produce renewing syntheses in which the features of an era are condensed and new possibilities to come are announced (Villalón, 2024: 435; translation my own).

The method of the group, meeting regularly with no formal leader, no judgement or correction but the involvement of everyone present, was, Villalón writes, ‘un antecedente fundamental para las practicas de poesía experimental en Chile’; ‘a fundamental precedent for experimental poetry practices in Chile’(799; translation my own). Reviewing his book, Pujol Duran observes that Villalón’s focus is less on the meaning of texts than descriptions of events and processes, bringing an important attention to bodies and materialities:

Hablar de estas obras … desde el punto de vista de su producción y su devenir como presencias es abrir las puertas a pensar y también sentir los impactos que es-tas tienen en los materiales y en los cuerpos, tanto en los de quienes las producen como en los de sus receptores, así como en los materiales mismos.

To talk about these works … from the perspective of their production and their development as presences is to open the door to thinking about and also feeling the impacts they have on materials and bodies, both those who produce them and those who receive them, as well as on the materials themselves (Pujol Duran, 2024: 245; translation my own).

The egalitarian social space of the Foro de Escritores extends in this way beyond attendees of the workshops, creating a changed culture of critical reception; Cobbing’s rejection of literary analysis as a workshop tool invites a critical response that looks beyond individual acts of expressive authorship to consider the collective spaces of poetry.

Following an intense period of workshops with performance and print publication for the first five years, the Foro de Escritores developed a stronger focus on public performance that eventually led to the Festival de Poesía y Música (PM), founded by Gonzalo Henríquez and Federico Eisner in 2014 with Gubbins’ involvement. Working with prominent cultural venues in Santiago, it continues with a public presence and level of institutional funding that is remote from the fragile infrastructure of upstairs rooms in pubs that supported the original Writers Forum in London. The endurance of these connections between the UK and Chile became evident in the Covid–19 pandemic, when Cussen and Bakero hosted 52 editions of a weekly online Zoom meeting, Language is à Virus, in which an invited poet, musician or artist would present their work, followed by a discussion and a sound poetry improvisation. The series revived connections between key members of Cobbing’s Writers Forum and the Foro de Escritores, while generating new relationships between UK, European and Latin American poets. As well as individual conversations with key figures from both groups, it included a session devoted to recollections of Foro de Escritores and its influence, which enabled a comparison between the two, and an elaboration of the connections between them. In that session, Bakero remembers that what both groups had in common was the overspill of poetry into the street, whether writing poetry in chalk on the London Underground after a Writers Forum meeting or composing poetry while walking in Santiago (Bakero and Cussen, 2020b). The extension of these relationships into the everyday spaces of digital communication offered new possibilities; for Cussen and Bakero as much as Gubbins, the creative work of poetry is related to organization and connection, and the poet exercises a mediated creativity that is enmeshed in the available technology. This allows collective expression to exceed the presence of the originating artist, and has implications for the dissemination and afterlife of the ‘now’ of the live event. The use of virtual spaces and online video platforms, when combined with longstanding artistic relationships forged in person, reveals transcultural relationships and their unfolding over time, while loosening and problematizing the significance of the national boundary.

The networks Gubbins and others developed in Chile have sustained audiences for experimental poetry’s interface with music as well as relationships with arts institutions. These have, in turn, enabled Gubbins to pursue and develop projects and approaches that began while he was in the UK, notably Alfabeto, written and self-published in London in 2002, and then republished in Santiago, where it was launched with a collective performance in December 2017. Its journey through textual forms to performance reflects the impetus to materialize visual scores as sound as well as the ‘creative misuse’ of the alphabet, a form used by many visual and sound poets, including Cobbing. Each page consists of one letter, repeated to create textures in grids that suggest woven textile, an aesthetic similar to certain works of Cobbing’s, for example the visual text ‘Are your children safe in the sea?’ (Cobbing and Cooper, 2015: 73). Gubbins’ Alfabeto has been presented in different forms including paintings, installations and electronic music. The launch performance, with an introductory presentation by Cussen and Marcela Labrana, took place at the National Library of Chile in Santiago, a French-style, nineteenth-century building, which houses significant national archives. The event was a collaboration with the Coro Fonético, directed by Karla Schüller, a joint project in which Gubbins’ book was used as a score (Coro Fonético, 2017). As a large-scale public event, it was scripted as a performance, not only for the voice but also in terms of gesture and movement, and the audience was guided from a second-floor room to a first-floor room on the other side of the building through a series of participatory performances, one for each letter. They began, seated, listening to the opening presentation. As Cussen finished speaking, members of the Coro Fonético moved through the audience making ‘Ah!’ sounds of agreement and understanding that gradually lengthened into a chorus of ‘a’ as the audience began to join in and respond. The raw material of the alphabet gathered multiple meanings, each intonation meaning something different for the performer. The affordance for creativity offered to the audience was structured by space and time, but the collective improvisation allowed each participant a singular voice within the whole—in this case, a particular tone of ‘¡Ah!’, a space to respond and for that response to become part of the performance. The letters of the alphabet themselves are given singularity in the performance, but in a relational sense, since an alphabet is always preceded by a language and the ‘being-with’ that is necessary for it to be spoken. Gaining in confidence and freedom as the performance continued, the participants’ voices were, by the end, echoing through the grandly cavernous spaces of the library. In one sense, this was a creative ‘misuse’ of a library, which is normally understood as a quiet space for reading, but in opening up each letter to a range of sound and interpretation it also suggested the Borgesian infinity of the Library of Babel (Borges, 1999).

Parts of the performance have a ritual quality, though Gubbins’ own role in the performance is low-key, and it is here that his approach differs from Cobbing’s shamanic performance persona. Gubbins sees the role of the poet less as shaman than DJ; it is a comparison that also illuminates the way in which the poet can catalyse expression, inviting the collective movement of bodies and organized sound in a space while enabling a multiplicity of participatory responses (Skoulding, 2021). In the film of the event, in which the camera sometimes draws back to reveal the patterns of moving bodies, all the audience participants moving through the library appear as performers; those who are watching the event later on a screen become a new audience (Coro Fonético, 2017). This combination of local participation and virtual presentation further calls into question the national limits of sound poetry in performance; despite their inflection in this Spanish-speaking context, the letters of the Roman alphabet remain open to new soundings and recombinations in multiple languages. Emerging from Gubbins’ immersion in English in London at the turn of the millennium, this is a piece that can be appreciated two decades later by Chilean audience participants and a secondary online audience (Bakero and Cussen, 2021), while the alphabet is itself a technology that prefigures and underpins the digital technology that makes the bridge between the two.

Centrally involved members of Writers Forum, Foro de Escritores and Language is à Virus, montenegrofisher embody the translingual and interdisciplinary potentiality of sound poetry in performance. Montenegro and Fisher have a strongly integrated practice, working across visual art, poetry, music and film, connecting multiple approaches in a multiform poetic process. Their written texts are produced collaboratively, finding expression more often in performance or visual forms than in stand-alone print publications. This makes their work inherently relational, and they work with a number of other regular collaborators such as Ginés Olivares, with whom they make films as mmmmmfilms. Beyond that, their work has involved numerous collaborative residencies in a variety of contexts across Europe and Latin America. Because of the many contexts in which they have worked, ranging from live art performances to literary festivals and gallery exhibitions, it would be misleading to suggest that they are influenced by Writers Forum in a directly linear or hereditary sense, but their work resonates strongly with it, challenging the notion of individual authorship in poetry and ‘carrying the thing on’ through a variety of translingual and participatory means. Working as a couple, they foreground and make evident the forms of work-life collaboration that have been present but frequently understated or misrepresented in the lives of earlier artist couples, including Jennifer Pike and Bob Cobbing.

Discussing their work in the series Language is à Virus, Montenegro foregrounds the importance of presence, commenting that ‘poetry has a way of making you present and making the other present’ (Bakero and Cussen, 2020a). This includes physical presence but is not confined to it, as their body of recorded works makes clear. She notes, in terms that recall Nancy, that writing together is a form of ‘being together’ and bringing people together, not a closing of a relationship but a means of thinking about the collective and its capacity for multiple, generative forms. Pujol Duran, discussing Montenegro’s work with the Foro de Escritores, draws attention to her use of languages from the south of Chile and Argentina, particularly the Chono language and the Selk’nam languages. She draws on an interview with Montenegro in which she comments that words from these languages have ‘presence’ even if they are not understood, an aurality in performance in which sounds will ‘clash in the air’, as described by the US-based Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña (Pujol Duran, 2021). That is, the shock of radical transformation of tradition is a means of sharing space translingually.

Vicuña is an important predecessor of the Chileans of Writers Forum as well as a respected contributor to Foro de Escritores and Language is à Virus. Her intermedial work, which like Cobbing’s synthesizes ritual and conceptual approaches, offers a useful framework for understanding how, for montenegrofisher, the politics of bodies and languages in performance intersect with activism. Vicuña moved to London in 1972, sympathetic to the Allende project but committed to a feminism that, as Daniel Borzutsky observes, was sometimes in tension with its masculine rhetoric (Alcalá, 2018: 20). Here, she co-founded Artists for Democracy after the Pinochet coup in 1973, and her work explores an ongoing identification with indigenous people through her use of the quipu, the Andean communication system of knotted threads. Juliana Spahr comments that Vicuña’s installations and performances are ‘all about alliance, about threads, about connections, about responsibilities to the histories of words and languages, and how they shape us’ (Alcalá and Vicuña, 2012: 320). Her installation Precarios: A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance (1973—1974) is ‘for the resistance’ in the political sense of supporting a human collective as well as being about objects that are themselves resistant, either by continuing to exist as evidence or resisting easy interpretation, or both, offering new connections through a language of bodies and materials. While Dowling’s theorization of the translingual centres mainly on a lyric tradition that is confronted and challenged in various ways, she reads Lo precario, the form of Vicuña’s fragile, ephemeral sculptures, as a critical frame that may be applied to poetry:

Vicuña frames bodily vulnerability as a question of relation, offering a differently grounded sense of ethics. Her concept of relation is at once more expansive and more materially grounded than the foundational Western abstractions of self and other seen in the philosophical literature on precarity and witnessing. That is, Vicuña emphasizes the ways in which bodies, objects, languages, and knowledge systems come together and depend upon one another (2018: 32).

This ecological decentring of the individual resonates with the work of montenegrofisher, who, like Vicuña, extend collective relations to the non-human, enabling audiences to experience the precariousness of what it is to be human, exploring what it is to be a body interwoven with surrounding materialities. Their translingualism begins in the plural, as a collective of two, which is expanded through sound, leaving traces of performance such as recordings, films, objects and drawings. In their online performance of ‘Manos’, for example, the translingual exchange between Fisher’s English and Montenegro’s Spanish makes a space of collective non-equivalence as they speak over each other with hand-related idioms in both languages (montenegrofisher, 2020). The hand raises the question of how poetry can intervene in situations that require action, while refocusing poetry on shared presence and embodied gesture: the smaller and more everyday acts of sociality and solidarity that are in themselves a politics and a form of resistance in which the difference and fragility of languages is central.

Their work is explicit in connecting minoritized languages with the ecological consequences of language loss. Recent live performance pieces include ‘Runa’, a rendition of English words derived from Quechua at the Poetry International Festival’s 2023 ‘Linguaparty’ at London’s South Bank. In foregrounding the presence of Quechua in English, the poem is both playful and politically incisive, revealing relationships with the natural world in ‘condor’ and ‘guano’ but also a cultural history, for example in ‘gaucho’. The repeated phrase ‘Runa, the people’, refers to the fact that in Quechua ‘Runa’ means both ‘speakers of Quechua’ and, simply, ‘the people’. Although the relation of English to Quechua is entirely different from the relation of Spanish to Quechua, the performance reflects the context of the event, which was part of the Poetry Library’s ongoing commitment to minority languages (montenegrofisher, 2023). The poem begins with call and response—the audience shouting back the words—and builds, with a brass Latin backing track, into a dance, in keeping with the festive mood of the ‘Linguaparty’, while the style of delivery oscillates between the celebratory shout and the cry of protest. It might appear to be more musical and more expressively direct than the traditions of experimental poetry exemplified by Writers Forum and Foro de Escritores, but the structural composition of the poem, a list of words in an unfamiliar language, is similar to Cobbing’s ‘Alphabet of Fishes’, which explores the names of fish in Cornish (Cobbing and Cooper, 2015: 59). The list is impersonal, but the parameters of a list are generative, expanding the potential of the poem into a collective space where other lists could be made from other languages.

montenegrofisher’s performance at the 2024 Kerala Literature Festival begins with Montenegro playing a recording of the names of endangered Keralan species in Malayalam, which she then translates as the ‘Miss Kerala’ fish (Denison barb), sand boa, silver owl, pangolin, Malabar civet, star tortoise and python. In the context of the festival on the beach of Kozhikode, entirely open to the largely Malayalam-speaking public for whom English is usually a second language, this embeds the performance in relationships, since montenegrofisher’s preparation has involved conversations with Malayalam-speaking contacts whose recorded voices are brought into the performance as a means of gesturing to the presence of human others as well as the disappearing presences of rare creatures. As in other 2024 events, they use toy whistles to make sea and bird sounds, the playfulness of these instruments contributing to the improvisatory feel of the performance rather than setting up a division between performer and audience through a display of virtuosity. Fisher’s use of an iPad to create musical textures is subtle on stage, and secondary to his interaction with the audience. Although Fisher generally handles the technical aspects of the performance, both speakers are equally present, facing the audience and making eye contact. The use of repetition has similarities with Cobbing’s use of ritual forms, but the presence of two speakers avoids the centralizing dynamic of the poet as shamanic authority. Their work evokes the space and dramatic form of a protest; the way in which their poetry plays with slogans, repeating and modifying them, often has the feel of a demonstration, a manifestación, a public language into which others are invited to join.

The experience of listening to ‘Treelogy’, which switches between the two speakers, some lines spoken together, is one of catching isolated phrases like ‘decolonization of the ear’, which resound like chanted slogans. Echoing repetitions like ‘books to banyan / banyan to books / books to banyan / banyan to books’ lodge alliteratively in the memory, while the poem builds up through a recitation of substances and materials, such as ‘sandalwood or rubber’ and nutmeg. The phrase ‘nutmeg revolution’ recalls Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), in which the links between the extractive economy of the spice trade is explored through the lens of colonization and today’s climate catastrophe. The poem poses objects and substances as agents of colonial resistance as well as historical exploitation, opening the way for a transformed imagination of human and non-human relations. The following poem, ‘the line and light’, refers to Jacques Lacan’s essay of the same name, which explores human subjectivity as situated in relation to the visible world and enmeshed with it (1964). Here, the extent of human impact on the solar system is staged through dystopian science-(non)fiction: ‘NASA wants to terraform Mars / a new type of plastic /creates the right conditions for life / and death’. The scenario is developed through use of vocal effects, particularly reverb on Fisher’s voice. An insect crosses Montenegro’s page, which she holds up to the audience, announcing: ‘I have a big ant walking through this poem’. This is an appropriate intervention for a performance concerned with the mutual interdependence of species, suggesting that ‘carrying the thing on’ might extend towards non-human beings, and that other bodies can be present in the poem. ‘Re’ begins as a sound poem with rolled ‘r’s before expanding into a meditation on the human body, its rhythms and environments, presenting it as porous and open, ‘expelling radio signals / exhaling ancient stars’. Amplified breathing and echo, of each other’s voices and as electronic sound effect, intensify in rhythm towards the final piece, the Quechua poem ‘Runa’, which takes on a new sense when performed in India, within a different set of colonial relationships. ‘The people’, in the context established by the performance as a whole, are singularities within an irreducibly plural system of lifeworlds.

montenegrofisher frequently give workshops in the context of their practice, which provide more scope for developing participatory and site-specific relationships. As stand-alone events or one-off engagements during artist residencies, these do not have the same kind of group continuity as Writers Forum, but they explore a similar interface between performance and collaboration. As part of the Bangor University project Placing Experiment, I invited them to give workshops for teachers, for groups of schoolchildren and for an event at the Gŵyl Tysilio Festival in Menai Bridge, Anglesey on July 16th 2023, in which I also participated. This workshop was titled ‘Intertidal Zones’ and the 15 participants, of mixed ages, included poets, schoolteachers, artists and other members of the local community. We met on Ynys Tysilio, and moved to a secluded spot behind its small church, facing down the Menai Strait, an area rich in bird life. After a warm-up of face-stretching and body-shaking, we were given cards with the names of endangered birds on them in Welsh, Latin and English. We called these out in the different languages, then tried them in different combinations—just the vowels, for example—and did this in pairs. We listened to the recordings of birds and called back to them, building up to a group choral performance of the different sounds. The sound of our voices, abstracted now from any of the languages we began with, resonated between us, creating an unexpected closeness that was also a ‘clash in the air’. For some of the participants, there was an element of embarrassment, akin to the embarrassment of stumbling from one language to another, of making the wrong sound, which in bilingual north Wales is a familiar form of unease. Caroline Bergvall’s well-known essay, ‘A Cat in the Throat’ addresses the difficulty of this situation, but also the value of the awareness that comes from it:

It is not about having a ‘voice’ (another difficult naturalising concept), it is about siting ‘voice’, locating the spaces and actions through which it becomes possible to be in one’s languages, to stay with languages, to effect one’s speech and work at a point of traffic between them, like a constant transport that takes place in the exchange between one’s body, the air, and the world. Language circulates in this conduit of air and shapes its articulated vibrations into both verbal and non-verbal sounds, semantic and somatic events, that can all be made manifest as language (2009).

The moment of crossing, being at the ‘point of traffic’ in a vowel that could be from any language, can be a euphoric experience of freedom as well as the basis of a relational ethics; in this sense, an awareness of one’s own resonating body in response to other human and non-human makers of sound. montenegrofisher’s practice has a particular relevance in the UK, where ideological monolingualism is associated with British exceptionalism and the memory of empire, as with Brexit, and right-wing fear of immigration. The performance of translingual poetry asserts an irreducible plurality and interdependence, creating an interference in singular or reductive constructions of nationhood and enabling ecological thinking in relation to other species. The performance of poetry draws on the same technologies of voice as political rhetoric and religious ritual, but far from being manipulative or mystical, the redistribution of what Claire describes as ‘the power and magic of language’ (Chant et al., 1971), whether through collaboration or in creating opportunities for participation, is a critique of power and a means of modelling new and more equitable relationships.

The continuing reverberations of Cobbing’s work reveal the relationship between an experimental and participatory ethos and the potential for making connections across cultures that far exceed the charisma of one individual poet and performer. These traces and echoes invite a critical response that takes poetry less as object than affordance, less as a crystallization of a given culture than a set of transcultural and translingual openings. At the crossing points between languages, collective performance and intermedial approaches—such as those explored through Writers Forum and the Foro de Escritores—offer a significant and innovative means of articulating the co-presence of bodies and languages. The endurance of these relations in digital contexts like Language is à Virus shows that one of the oldest creative technologies—that of the voice in performance—has a role to play in enabling us to navigate relationships in technological and virtual spaces, while the body remains central to an understanding of how performance, through the primacy of sound, can enable new forms of community. Cobbing’s sense of poetry as a collective space infused by linguistic multiplicity offers generative potential for the future of poetry in major languages like English and Spanish, opening it in new ways to non-native speakers, while creative attention to the materiality of the voice makes poetry a medium that can extend solidarities with minoritized languages and non-human perspectives.

References