Both Flesh and Not: Essays

MR. COGITO

THE BEST BOOK OF 1994 is the first English translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito, a book of poems that came out in Poland in the mid-1970s, well before Herbert’s justly famous Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems. Mr. Cogito’s a character who appears in most of Herbert’s best poems — he’s kind of a poetic Pnin, both intellectual and not too bright, both hopelessly confused and bravely earnest as he grapples with the Big Questions of human existence.

Zbigniew Herbert is one of the two or three best living poets in the world, and by far the best of what you’d call the “postmoderns.” Since any great poem communicates an emotional urgency that postmodernism’s integument of irony renders facile or banal, postmodern poets have a tough row to hoe. Herbert’s Cogito-persona permits ironic absurdism and earnest emotion not only to coexist but to nourish one another. Compared to Mr. Cogito, the whole spectrum of American poetry — from the retrograde quaintness of the Neoformalists and New-Yorker-backyard-garden-meditative lyrics to the sterile abstraction of the Language Poets — looks sick. It seems significant that only writers from Eastern Europe and Latin America have succeeded in marrying the stuff of spirit and human feeling to the parodic detachment the postmodern experience seems to require. Maybe as political conditions get more oppressive here, we Americans’ll get good at it, too.

— 1994