The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Lisa DeVuono serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2024.
Poetry Magnets
There’s a feast waiting to happen
on the outside
of my refrigerator.
For months
words cling like mouths from famine
waiting for me to transform
bread into body, water into wine
to mix nouns and verbs,
a dash of adjective, pinch of comma,
create a whole new recipe
of witticisms.
The miracle occurs without me.
Words fall off demagnetized
and slip into every crack
under floors and walls
into closets and bedclothes
among clutter and noisemaking.
I wash my face and they fall from faucets.
I drive my car and they sing on radios.
I go to work and they tumble from wallets.
I hand over whole sentences
for the paying of lunch.
It’s my body, it’s my soul.
We feed with poems
and the feast we put on
is not the Last Supper, but the First
April’s poem “Poetry Magnets” celebrates National Poetry Month and initiates my yearlong blog postings of poems and commentary as the new Mad Poet of the Year. Thrilled to be sharing with all of you.
The origin of this poem goes back twenty years. My office was the standard issue cubicle so to personalize it, I installed magnetic words on the outside metal walls. Within a few days, colleagues would stop by to ask a question and then pause quizzically, eventually staying long enough to shuffle words around and to form a clever sentence or haiku. Soon there were enough poems to submit to the company newsletter, and now employees from outside of my department stopped to introduce themselves and craft a poem. A real poetry rave.
Later when I moved on to another job and packed up my office, I noticed that many magnetic words had slipped onto the carpet, behind my bookcase, and I even found some in my desk drawers! Me thinks, I smell a poem. Thus the birth of the line “Words fall off demagnetized and slip into every crack under floors and walls,” and from there, the poem practically wrote itself.
These days, I see poems everywhere. In her poem “Valentine for Ernest Mann,” Naomi Shihab Nye invites us to do the same with her words, She advises, “Check your garage, the odd sock in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite. And let me know.”
Where do your poems live?
Lisa DeVuono is the 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. She was one of the founders of It Ain’t Pretty, a women’s writing collective that performed locally. She produced multi-media shows incorporating song, music, poetry, and dance, including Rumi in Song at the Sedgwick Theater; and Whole Heart Home, and Breaking Open Breaking Free, part of the IceHouse Tonight series in Bethlehem.
She led creativity and poetry workshops and has worked with teens in recovery and cancer patients. She wrote a peer-based curriculum Poetry as a Tool for Recovery: An Easy-to-Use Guide in Eight Sessions for facilitators working with persons living with mental health challenges.
In addition to the full-length manuscript This Time Roots, Next Time Wings, her poetry has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Paterson Literary Review and the anthology Grit Gravity & Grace: New Poems about Medicine and Healthcare. She is the author of the chapbook Poems from the Playground of Risk published by Pudding House Press and was the recipient of an honorable mention in Passaic County Community College’s annual Allen Ginsberg Contest.
Recently retired, she has worked as an administrator, librarian and lay chaplain.