Important Announcement

Dave Barry's doing his second annual Poetry Contest.

For those who missed it last year, it all started with this post, when he discovered Poetry.com will publish literally anything you send in:

MEANWHILE, however, this blog has a little project to amuse anybody who is interested, involving a wonderful site called www.poetry.com, which was brought to this blog's attention by alert reader Laura Stark. Aspiring poets can go there and submit poems in the poetry contest, and maybe even -- incredibly -- have their poems selected for inclusion in heirloom-quality-bound volumes that are -- What are the odds of this? -- for sale!

So anyway, this blog was just thinking how interesting it would be if a whole bunch of people submitted poems that contained a certain key poetic phrase. To see how it might work, this blog submitted a poem under the pen name of "Freemont A. Harkins," entitled: "A Sad Day." Here's how it goes:

A Sad Day

i am sad, so very sad
the tears run down my nose
it was a happy day until
the dog ate mother's toes

You can see this poem at www.poetry.com, using the search engine to search for "Freemont Harkins." Wouldn't it be fun if a lot of people submitted poems using a Pen Name that began with "Freemont" and incorporating the phrase, "the dog ate mother's toes"? Then we all could search for poems written under the first name of "Freemont" -- currently, this blog is the only one -- and see how creative everybody was!

Several thousands of us did so, with some interesting results:

A number of you have written to inform this blog that Poetry.com (Motto: "EVERYBODY Is A Semi-Finalist!") has chosen your poems by a person whose first name is Freemont about a dog eating his mothers' toes as Semi-Finalists, which means that Poetry.com has moved you up to a Higher Level, which means you have a chance to... send money to Poetry.com! Congratulations!

Poetry.com eventually caught on. They didn't appreciate the joke despite the fact their hitcount was higher than it had probably been in years, and took them down. Bastards.

So, this year's theme:

This year we will once again be submitting our poems to the fun-loving guys and gals at poetry.com, who, we are sure, truly enjoy being a part of this effort. Just click on "ENTER CONTEST" and write your poem. To identify yourself as a participant in the Poetry Project, you should enter a "nomme de plume" (literally, "hors d'oeuvre") that includes the name "Habte," followed by a hyphen. The only restriction concerning the content of your poem is that it should include some reference to a mullet hairstyle. For example:

THE PAIN OF LOVE
By Dave Habte-Barry

I love you, dear, with all my heart
And infinite desire
And so I cry each time you set
My mullet hair on fire

I'm sure you folks can do much better.

Update: I've been reading your poems, and I just want to say that I am very proud of all of you. I'm also hoping that none of you are operating heavy machinery.

It's a juvenile joke, I know, but it has a serious Iowa connection. It appears that a guy on the University of Iowa Alumni Board named Ted Habte-Gabr has a mullet. (Yep, it's a mullet. Don't try to deny it.) That alone would make him, well, "special," but it turns out he also has some rather unspecified connection with Dave Barry. This has led to rather merciless photoshopping throughout the month of June.

Now we have a national poetry contest in honor of Mr. Habte-Gabr.

So tell me: how can the state of Iowa pass over him to honor Annette Benning? It boggles the mind, I tell you.

Boggles.


. . . .

Never mind, I'll take my meds now.