Really, Bob Cobbing, what do you want from us?

Question 1: In the Bob Cobbing interview, Cobbing argues against verbal criticism, but seems fine with audience judgement. So what's the difference? Cobbing seems to suggest that criticism is a kind of in-your-face analysis (peer review meets catfight, I suppose), saying, "The point about criticism is that it is frequently wrong." Instead of the audience reacting "from their own point of view without any regard for where the poems are coming from," he suggests that readers/performers can intuit whether the audience likes the work, then make changes accordingly (Sutherland 3). But if we take into consideration Cobbing's own philosophy about the ways poetry should move its audience throughout their entire bodies (Cobbing 3), how is it possible for an audience to take in a poem from the author's point of view? Isn't the body and its sensations a personal thing, experienced from one's own point of view? Or is the real idea here that the audience should be bodily moved by experiencing the author's point of view, and when that's not possible, the reaction will be negative, thus spurring necessary changes on the author's part?

And to make things more complicated, what about publication? Cobbing suggests that "it's best to get stuff out and that way it can be discussed and evaluated, rather than judging it before hand" (Sutherland 4). This draws a huge line (pun totally intended) between live poetry and recorded or published poetry. So, what Cobbing really seems to be saying is that criticism is okay, as long as it's either not in the presence of the author or from anyone's point of view except the author's. And I suppose it makes sense in regards to his philosophy of feeling the ritual of the poem, in that the author is also called upon to feel the audience feeling his work.

Question 2: Speaking of Bob Cobbing and sensing or feeling his poetry, what's the difference between Cobbing's visual poetry and assymetries? Cobbing calls visual poetry "an image which had a sound associated with it" (Sutherland 6), while the assymetries are "nonstanzaic chance-generated poems of which the printed formats are notations for solo or group performances" (Young Turtle Assymetries 1). So with a visual poem, the audience can hear the sound by looking/reading the text, and with assymetries, the audience can hear the sound when it's performed from the page. So is the only difference that the performers act as mediators? And what about when we hear the sound that visual poetry is representing in our heads? That sound has to have been generated from some memory of hearing that sound in the past, so is that memory acting as the mediator? And if that's true, then does noise while hearing that sound in our heads impact the experience in the same way that noise impacts the performance of an assymetry?