What Barnum Said. Or Maybe He Didn't ...

The old saying, "There's a sucker born every minute" has for a long time been attributed to P. T. Barnum. I actually thought it was W. C. Fields, or maybe it was W. C. Fields in the role of P. T. Barnum, but it turns out I was wrong too. The line was actually delivered by David Hannum, a rival of Barnum's. He tried to scam the public with a fake archeological artifact, only to be upstaged by Barnum, which prompted the famous line.

Now, what this has to do with me is this: I'd been chatting with a friend of mine and she suggested I should start submitting my poetry because there are all kinds of markets out there and I have rather a lot of poetry. So I was looking through some of the many sites I have bookmarked and one of them was having a contest for a poetry form called the Etheree. This just happens to be a form I've never tried before, but I figured what have I got to lose? And who knows, I might even become $100.00 richer for it.

Only you have to join their community to access their contests. So for the sake of the contest I did. And then once I signed my life away I discovered that I had to upgrade to a paid membership before I could enter their contest. Which I didn't. I guess I'm not that big a sucker after all.

But still, it wasn't a totally bad experience. I discovered a new poetry form and I wrote my first poem of the new year. :-)

The Etheree poetry form is a great form for beginners or people who don't like to rhyme. The basic form is ten lines long. The first line is one syllable, the second line is two syllables, and so forth until the tenth line of ten syllables. Once you get the hang of it you also try doing it in reverse, going from ten syllables to one, or get all fancy and do the first verse going one to ten, and a second verse going from ten back down to one. You could actually have a lot of fun with it.

Ice
blankets
the trees and
grass, creating
a winter landscape
that glistens in the sun.
Listen, do you hear the chimes
from the sinuous breeze winding
its way between shards of crystal?
Winter has never sounded so lovely.

A faint but steady dripping sound instead
of crystal chimes is heard as winter
with great reluctance bows before
the advancement of the sun -
like it or like it not,
spring is on its way
and cannot be
halted for
any
one.