The Publishing Cooperative "Czytelnik" invites you on October 9, 2025, to a meeting with Jan Wołek centered around the poetry collection "Anyone. Poems on gray paper and black ink". 📅 The conversation with the Author will be led by Janusz Drzewucki. Free admission. This is how Jan Wołek writes about his work: I hope never to reach such a level of bliss that I could utter the words – "I am a poet!" Setting aside the overused "one becomes a poet," I would rather reserve the term "poet" for literary Methuselahs, who, bathed in the honey of bronze, dwell only in the heights, and if they deign to utter a word, it bears the mark of divinity even before it resonates. It is great and already so! I prefer the smaller ones, independent of the anointing by history, lexicons, critics, and Polish (or other) teachers. Those chosen by each reader as their confessor, alter ego, to whom they owe gratitude for the kinship of souls. I write poems and songs. In my own way. Without all that intellectual "curtain flexing." Less from the brain, more from the heart. Less from the desk, more from the street. Poetry, for me, is a state of permanent tension. Permanent readiness. A state of vigilant observation of the surroundings. Distilled, wrung-out prose. Then just add water, and there you have it. But not the tortured, wrung-out answer to the question, "what did the poet mean." Everyone adds their own water. Co-creates. So you, who read what I have written, are also responsible for this poem. We wrote it together.
