Hour 7 prompt: Write a poem titled Season of the (fill in the blank). Write a poem that matches or interacts with the title.
Kevin O'Conner
Kevin J. O'Conner
2022 is my sixth year participating in the Poetry Marathon. As usual, I plan to do the half-marathon—because sleep. The current incarnation of my more-or-less official bio goes like this: According to his phone’s auto-complete function, Kevin J. O’Conner ‘is a poet who is not sure what he does, but doesn’t have any other way to make sure he has a more appropriate experience with his own story.’ This is not far from the truth. To date, Kevin has published twelve full-length poetry collections; his latest is 2019's WISHES SOMETIMES HAVE CONSEQUENCES. His poems have also appeared in The 143 Project, The CDC Poetry Project, Raven Chronicles, Spindrift, Passionfruit, The Poetry Marathon Anthology (2016, 2017, 2019), and Voices That Matter. He used to live by a creek near Seattle, but now he lives in the City of Subdued Excitement. These days, a pronounced case of something resembling writer's block has Kevin focusing more on creating improvised sounds (which may or may not be music) using a variety of electronic instruments. The titles of the resulting pieces are closer to poetry than he otherwise gets. Consequently, this year's marathon should be a good chance to shake out the cobwebs a bit. https://ordinaryaveragethoughts.com/ * * * * * * * * * * Now on with the countdown!
2020 Poetry Marathon, Hour 4
Hour 4 prompt: an epistolary poem.
2020 Poetry Marathon, Hour 2
Hour 2 prompt: The recipe thing. I listed my ingredients, then followed the recipe (sort of).
2020 Poetry Marathon, Hour 1
Hour 1 prompt: Write a poem about a famous woman or an influential woman you know personally.
That time already?
[avatar user=”kevinjoconner” size=”thumbnail” align=”left” /]
Oh, these are weird times! If one thing isn’t falling apart, something else is. Or everything else is.
Fortunately, it is Poetry Marathon time again. This will be my fourth time participating—and, as I always say, I have opted to do the half-marathon again, because I like sleep.
I am looking forward to seeing what comes out this time around. Will I be able to get through 12 hours without writing anything about death or covid? Well, probably not, I suspect—but if any of the prompts can coax a new angle on something out of me, that’ll be good enough.
Good luck to everyone!
—Kevin
(25 June 2020)
2019 Poetry Marathon: My half-marathon recap
Another year’s half marathon come and gone. As I often point out, I prefer to do the half marathon because I like to sleep; consequently doing the full 24-hour marathon simply wouldn’t work for me, as it would take me at least a couple of days to get back to normal.
Making things easier this year was my recent acquisition of Scrivener. Thanks to the program’s separate panes, I was able to have the prompt always visible as I wrote:
As before, I worked with all the prompts for the sake of simplicity. That said, a couple of them still gave me trouble. For example, for the hour 5 prompt calling for a poem about a dream, nothing immediately came to mind, so I dug out a couple of my old journals that I knew included detailed descriptions of dreams I’d had. The problem was that the ones I still have dim memories of today turned out to be not that interesting. I finally just picked one and tried to reduce it to the barest details (taking a couple of liberties along the way). Similarly, none of the photos in the hour 4 prompt did much for me—and my first choice (the black-and-white photo of the woman next to the tipped-over stool) felt a little too obvious for me. And the song chosen for the hour 7 prompt was not at all my taste, so I had to take some time to find something I would find more inspiring.
In the end, most poems took me 30–45 minutes to write, lightly edit, and post. On the whole, I think they turned out all right. At least, I didn’t hate any of the poems I posted.
This time, I did get around to checking out the later prompts and using them to write additional poems. I posted only one of them (also written while listening to music), however.
Now to pick out the two poems to edit and submit for the anthology…
(23 June 2019)
We forged on…
Erasure poem using p. 143 of art sex music by Cosey Fanni Tutti (Faber & Faber, 2017):
We forged on—
artists, poets and musicians
He was wild
dangerous and uncompromising
I was stuck at a local factory
for quite a while
I’d been practising
and felt pretty good about my organ
It was coming along
for an arduous journey
I loved fun
Any hitches were
never a problem
He’d just smile
and use
(22 June 2019, Hour 12)