Poem on the city of Lublin

Poemat o mieście Lublinie [The Poem about the City of Lublin] was written in 1934 and is the culmination of a cycle of poems devoted to Lublin - the "surreal capital" of the poetic world of Józef Czechowicz. When talking about this work, we must remember about its ancestors, about the whole family of texts related to it, about its rich "genealogy", which dates to 1929, when Czechowicz included in a letter to Gralewski the manuscript of the first version of the poem Lublin z dala [Lublin far away].

The text of Poem... consists of Czechowicz's poems from the volume Stare kamienie [Old Stones], which are linked by poetic prose and enriched by the background music proposed by the poet. The work was developed by Czechowicz as a script for a radio play, as evidenced by the notes in the margins of the manuscript: "Music as background (lullaby), preferably violin, wind, clocks from towers", etc. The first radio production of Poemat... was the radio play Lublin, broadcast as part of the cycle Poetic Quadrangle, which - devoted to the beauty of the homeland - presented individual cities and regions of Poland. The first broadcast took place on 9 July 1937 in the national programme Warsaw I (Raszyń). The event was announced in the pages of "Antena" on 4 July 1937 and twice in "Express Lubelski", on 7 and 9 July 1937. From the press information, we learn that the radio play featured Antoni Bohdziewicz, an excellent radio personality and film reviewer, and Irena Kwiatkowska, at the time a young, promising actress who was just beginning her stage career and almost sixty-five years of collaboration with Polish Radio.

According to the recollections of the poet and his friends, Czechowicz was no stranger to the discreet charm of flaneur. This is also confirmed by the poems of the author of Kamień, in which the motif of strolling often appears. The "rocking with steps" is also the origin of Poemat... - a lyrical description of a night walk through the streets of Lublin during the first full moon in July. The successive poems and narrative intermedia precisely define the route of the poetic peregrination. However, in Poemat... thanks to personification, animation and many other myth-making devices, real space is transformed into poetic reality, inscribed into a timeless, universal plan, into eternal duration.