Herbert on Pop Music

Peter J. Leithart, October 31, 2006

Zbigniew Herbert writes in a poem entitled "Mr Cogito and Pop" of a visit to a concert. "Mr Cogito," a recurring character in Herbert's poems, reflects on the "aesthetics of noise" and offers some penetrating observations on the character of contemporary pop music:

"to be a god
means to hurl thunderbolts"

The inarticulate scream of the rock concert elicits a meditation on silence:

"the difficulty is
that the shriek eludes form
is poorer than the voice
which ascends
and falls

the shriek touches silence
but through hoarseness
not through the will
to describe silence

it is garishly dark
from powerlessness of articulation"