Your Secret Door to Happy

Jon DeVries hopes these poems lift people out of the annoyances of modern life so they can reflect on their humanity, love, and creativity.

"Your Secret Door to Happy" is a book of 49 new, original poems written between 2022 and 2024. The poems range from love and comedy to social consciousness and pieces of the imagination. The wonder of poetry and imagination is that in a world filled with rules about pretty much everything, there are no rules to poetry and imagination. You can freely express your imagery, fantasy, creation, inspiration, and inventiveness. The only rule that Jon DeVries has in writing poetry is that he will not write a poem unless he feels it will help someone. He hopes this book lifts people out of the minute-to-minute annoyances that modern life can generate and makes them reflect on their humanity, love, and the creativity with which we are all endowed.

Jon DeVries grew up in Upstate New York and began writing poetry during his freshman year of college in 1968, which was one hell of an interesting, society-changing year. He's wanted to finish and publish a book of poetry for the last 50 years. Songwriting and singing in a couple of bands in his twenties was a catalyst for Jon's poetry journey. He drove around the country through forty-four states, all in a pickup truck with a camper shell on the back. His first book, "No Blues Cafe", was inspired by that season and published in 2022. "You might be very surprised to find how valuable your own thoughts and observations can be to others. It is a horrible cliché, but there is, indeed, a poet in all of us. Any one of us who has lived life (and not just avoided it) has seen things that have made us cry, doubled us over in laughter, made us purple with rage or pink with passion. And we have learned with every impact, getting smarter and more knowledgeable with any failure. So, this is my turn – and I hope you take your turn, too." - Jon DeVries