Add MS 88909/143-158

Papers deriving from Cobbing's involvement with the Poetry Society (then located at 21 Earls Court Square, London) and with Poets Conference meetings.

Cobbing was first elected to the General Council of the Poetry Society in 1968, and became its Honorary Treasurer in 1970, the same year in which Poets Conference held its inaugural meeting. Poets Conference was a pressure group (or quasi trade union) which campaigned to improve the working conditions of poets (e.g. professional fees for readings).

The papers in this section comprise both an extensive run of formal Minutes of various Poetry Society committees on which Cobbing served, and a number of informal papers, notes and drafts, as well as some items of correspondence.

The span of the files coincides with a particularly turbulent period in the history of the Poetry Society in which the Society's traditional membership clashed with the new and more radical membership with which Cobbing was associated, and which, between 1970 and 1976, had the upper hand. During this period, the Society's journal, Poetry Review, was edited by Eric Mottram, and published concrete and other experimental poetry that contrasted sharply with the more conventional poetry with which the journal had previously been associated. Eventually, the Arts Council, which funded the Society, commissioned an investigative report into the conduct of the Society (by Sir John Witt, 1976), to which considerable reference is made in the files but which, unfortunately, is not present in Cobbing's papers. Cobbing and a number of other members resigned en masse in 1977.