What leads people of all ages and social conditions to connect to the work of the Polish poet and priest Jan Twardowski (1915-2006)? Critics and readers agree: it’s the fact that they can come across a simple and charitable one that brings beauty, kindness and hope to their lives. Netflix has carved out a niche for him in their catalog and now his verses shine with a light of their own alongside anime, true crime stories and Korean dramas.
“Let’s hurry to love people already that they disappear so soon”. This verse from one of his best-known poems serves as the gateway to a delicate and intense documentary: “Jan Twardowski: The Poet Father”. Over the course of 38 minutes, we witnessed a live birth, a Mass, the reading of a dozen poems, countless silences and many other testimonies that evoke silence.
“I work as a machinist. I should have worked on this all my life. It makes me very happy and I feel very fulfilled, because I’ve always enjoyed helping others,” explains a middle-aged tram conductor who discovered Twardowski’s lines thanks to his wife. With the priest’s poems, the worker learned to see reality differently.
In the next scene, the man is seen with his son in the garden. They build a homemade swing. “I would like to teach Michał to have compassion; to be a good man, who doesn’t break under the pressure of evil or the problems he has. Sooner or later, kindness will win. I’m sure of that”, he says.
The driver reads “Ode to Despair”, a poem in which Twardowski’s determination to address concrete pain, the one that finds no relief in textbooks, becomes clear. or for which there are no correct answers:
poor despair,
complete monster!
Here they torment you terribly:
moralists deceive you,
ascetics kick you,
Doctors prescribe pills to make you go away
They call you a sin…
And still without you
I would end up smiling nonstop, like a piglet in the rain,
I would fall enchanted like a calf,
)would make me inhuman (…)
For Twardowski, faith and compassion go hand in hand. In the documentary, the priest who helped him by 15 years in the Church of the Pilgrims explains: “He taught me, as a man and as a priest, a very basic thing. First of all, you have to be human. n be a Christian. And finally, Father. Father Twardowski said that should be the order of things. (…) He was always very human.”
This humanity allows Twardowski to converse with very varied people. A woman who has just become a mother connects to the praise of imperfection he makes in the poem “A childless angel”, a whole ball of oxygen in front of the pristine maternity hospitals on Instagram. A very diligent student learns in the poem “Nothing” not to take everything so seriously. A teenage karate and poetry fan thanks Twardowski for helping him understand the value of each person. A -year-old translator, moving in with her boyfriend, says that Twardowski’s poetry “made her feel that the world and people are kind by nature.”
Twardowski convert your readers? We do not know. And it’s unclear if he intends that either. What he wants is to bring everyone – not just the faithful – a cordial poetry, with a compassionate and non-reproachable look, full of humor and gratitude for life, as described by Anna Sobieska and Antonio Benítez Burraco in the preface of a “Poetic Anthology” published by the publisher Rialp.
It is a poetry that is born “from the theology of the God who smiles”, in the words of the literary critic Andrzej Sulikowski; that invites readers to discover not only the imprint of God in all that was created, but also to see the thousand ways that God finds to show them His tenderness. In the poem “The closest thing”: “God loves you for that cordial letter you received (…)”. Or in the poem “I felt afraid”:
I was afraid. My vision fails me: I won’t be able to read anymore;
I lose my memory: I won’t be able to write anymore;
I trembled like the sheepfold shaken by the wind.
God reward you, Lord, because he offered me his paw
the dog that doesn’t read books or write poems.
These are poems devoid of eloquence, which move because of their sincerity. Twardowski thrills because he shows things as they are. A good example of this is the poem “Explanation”:
I have not come to convert you:
Any scholarly sermon has long since disappeared from my head,
I’ve been naked in any form of glitter for a long time (…);
I won’t give you the can
asking for your opinion on Merton;
when we argue, I won’t act like a turkey,
always with that clown nose in his beak; (…)
I will just sit next to you
and confide my secret to you:
I, a priest,
believe in God as a child would.
The documentary ends with a university professor elderly woman, as affectionate as she was unaccommodating: “I must say something about the role of Father Twardowski in Polish literature. Many poets and historians value the depth and diversity of his work, as well as his incredible talent for reaching ordinary people. Recently, I don’t know who told me they had a conversation about Twardowski with a taxi driver. Turns out the taxi driver read Twardowski and loved his poems. (…) Many Poles need and yearn for poetry like this.”
What is she talking about? The poet himself gave a clue in a book expressively entitled “Amazed with Grace. My Happy Memories”: “The Gospel is hope in the face of despair and I would like to write poems like it. Poems like this are needed in today’s world. (…) My objective is to speak of faith to a world that lacks it; of hope for a world that expects nothing; of love to a world where that love does not exist. I write about the people I meet every day, in the confessional and on the street. The important thing is to lean towards man and also to open up to another reality, which is invisible and is beyond our experience.”
