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.
Season’s End
This is not a poem about baseball.
How the game has been cliched as America’s favorite pastime
or played as elegance - a choreography of grace.
It’s not about how the team won the World Series in the last moment
crack of a bat like thunder splitting the stadium’s sky.
Nor is it about overzealous fans fair-weathering their hometown players.
It’s not even about the eight-year-old who collects cards and stats
who mugs for the camera after reaching for the foul ball
that pirouetted into his grandfather’s glove.
It is a poem about hot summer nights
when just about everyone in Northeast Philly
was listening to the game,
some on tiny transistor radios,
others while fidgeting with the dial in Dad’s old Dodge Dart
on the way to picking up pizza and beer on Saturday night.
It’s about the time we hung out in your bedroom on St. Vincent’s Street
with a window fan blowing over our hot bodies
your dog Beethoven lying down between us like an old chaperone
howling whenever your dad shouted “oh jeez” or “c’mon” at the tv
or your mom calling up to ask if we wanted the last slice of pie
before you had to drive me home.
It’s not really a poem about baseball
but about everything happening around it.
How we fell in love and dropped the ball that summer
when both of us took off our mitts as we collided yelling “Bail out.”
Like any seasoned player, we did our very best
knowing we weren’t going to win the game this time around.
This poem came to me via a simple prompt “write a poem using the word baseball.”
I must confess I am one of those fair-weather fans who tunes into the local teams just at the end of the season. The only exception was when I was a teenager and a rabid fan ofhockey, especially the Philadelphia Flyers. I used to cut articles out of three newspapers; wrote songs or traded player cards; begged my father to drive me to team appearances. And if I was lucky enough, attended a live game. Otherwise, I was glued to the television wearing my handmade tie-dyed t-shirt with a black Flyers emblem sewn on the front. (see the fuzzy photo above)
I have since hung up my fanaticism, so when this prompt was suggested, I wasn’t sure I could write a poem about baseball. I had only been to a handful of games but I had strong memories of hanging out with my college boyfriend and his family and their exuberance about the home team. This poem emerged through recounting those youthful details and focusing on everything but the game specifics.
I remembered that isn’t really about baseball or hockey at all but the feelings we have, and the stories and connections we make around cheering for the home team.
Sometimes we make it to the Super Bowl or the World Series but like all good aphorisms, it’s not about winning or losing but about how we play the game.
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.