The Poetry Marathon

Good morning! The challenge for hour one is to write a poem that contains the refrain “I am” at least six times. You can start every stanza with it, or be more subtle. You can take make the poem autobiographical or absurd, or best of all a mix of both.

Good luck and happy writing!

The marathon is fast approaching! 430 people from all around the globe have signed up to participate in the 2019 Poetry Marathon.

The official start time of the Marathon is 9 AM ET on June 22nd. If you need to find out when that is in your timezone go here.

If you applied to participate in the Poetry Marathon you should have already heard from us by now. If you have not heard from us please email us at poets@thepoetrymarathon.com.

Most people who participate set the whole day aside for the event. You get the most out of the event if you fully commit. Many poets write warm up poems during this week for this reason.

I prepare all food for the event beforehand and make sure I have a few treats on hand. Also, when doing the full marathon I set an alarm every hour on the hour to remind me to write.

Everyone is different but I usually spend a half hour of every hour of the marathon writing. I usually put a big pile of books on my desk and open them to random pages for inspiration when I’m stuck.

I wish everyone whose participating this year the best of luck! It’s good to see so many familiar faces and so many new ones.

The very first t-shirt for our event is now available here. There are three different color options. Any money we make (which won’t be much) will go towards future marathons.

We figure most people won’t want to order this t-shirt till they actually survive the marathon, but we wanted everyone to know about it in advance.

We may introduce other designs if this sells well, so feel free to give us suggestions in the comments.

Tonight we sent out the first round of acceptances for the 2019 Poetry Marathon! We’re very excited. Over two hundred people will be accepted in the first round.

Instead of offering a last minute secondary sign up period this marathon, we are extending the sign up period to the 15th of June. So the last day to sign up is the 15th of June!

You can sign up here for the full marathon (24 poems in 24 hours, one poem per hour) and the half marathon (12 poems in 12 hours, one poem per hour). All poems must be posted on the blog. This year for the first time the poems can be made private, so that the only people who see your work are other marathoners.

The Poetry Marathon will start at 9 AM ET on June 22cd. Half marathoners can start at 9 AM or 9 PM on June the 22cd.

If you complete the marathon or half marathon you are eligible to submit to The 2019 Poetry Marathon Anthology edited by Jennifer Faylor.

The details of the anthology will be released after the Marathon. To learn more about The Poetry Marathon as a whole go here.

Sign up is now open for the 2019 Poetry Marathon! You can sign up here.

The 2019 Poetry Marathon starts at 9 AM ET on Saturday June 22nd, and will go till 9 AM ET on Sunday the 23rd of June. Those who are interested in doing a half marathon start at 9 AM ET on June 22nd and go till 9 PM on the 22nd. Or they will start at 9 PM ET on the 22cd and continue to 9 AM on the 23rd.

The goal of the poetry marathon is to write and post one poem an hour for 24 hours. Half marathoners post a poem per hour for a 12 hour period.

This is an international event with participants from all around the globe. Generally 500 people attempt the marathon. You do not have to be a poet to participate.

To learn more go here. To sign up go here.

If you are interested in participating please sign up by the 12th of June! We will get back to applicants on a rolling basis.

Sign up starts on June Third! Jacob and I are going to be particularly busy this year, as our daughter celebrates her first birthday on the second of June, but we are excited!

The prompts are all ready to go and have been scheduled. This year some hours will have more than one prompt so that people have more options. Thank you to everyone who contributed a prompt.

Another big shift this year is that the posts in the marathon will be private by default. If you participate you can see others posts, if you don’t participate, you won’t.

However, if you do want to share your work with friends you are free to do so on your own blogs are social media. But the overwhelming feeling of the group was that private posts would be preferred.

The other big piece of news is that we have an editor for our Poetry Anthology this year. I’m really excited about this as it’s the first time I am not going to be the editor.

Jennifer Faylor is a poet and literary editor raised in NYC where she earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Currently she lives in Washington State and is working on her first short story collection. Her website is jenniferfaylor.com.

She has volunteered and participated in a number of previous marathons!

The Poetry Marathon itself will be on June 22cd but in order to participate you have to apply for free between the 3rd-12th of June.

Applying takes minutes, but we found that it helps in terms of making marathoners more committed and prepared for the event itself.

The 2019 Poetry Marathon will be like the 2017 Poetry Marathon in most ways. There will be two half marathon options. We will have volunteer help.

The one difference will be the anthology. In the past I (Caitlin Jans) have done 90% of the work on the anthology with Jacob Jans finalizing the work. This year our hope is to raise enough money to pay an editor to put together the anthology.

The major motivator behind this is that fact that I just don’t have the time to edit the anthology between our kids, my own writing, facilitating the poetry marathon, and my job.

We have never fund-raised for the marathon before and have paid all expenses ourselves, and we will continue to do so, outside of the editor for the anthology.

We are going to start reaching out to possible editors (who will have to be past marathon participants) and figuring out how we will raise the money for the anthology.

The amount of money we will be looking to raise will be around 500 dollars.

If we don’t receive the money to pay the anthology editor in all likelihood we will not go forward with publishing the anthology this year. However we have

If you have any questions or ideas to help fund-raise please send an email to poets@thepoetrymarathon.com.

If you are not familiar with the anthology you can view the 2017 one here.

We are always grateful for your support and participation.

The goal of the Poetry Marathon is to write one poem every hour, for twenty-four hours, straight. There is also a half marathon option, to write one poem every hour for twelve hours straight.

The 2019 Poetry Marathon starts at 9 AM ET on Saturday June 22nd and goes till 9 AM on Sunday the 23rd of June. Those who are interested in doing a half marathon can either start at 9 AM EST on the 22nd of June and go till 9 PM. Or they can start at 9 PM EST on the 22nd and go till 9 AM on the 23rd of June. The second option might work better for poets living outside of North America.

If you want to figure out what time the Poetry Marathon will be for your time zone, this time zone converter can be very helpful.

Sign up will start in late May/early June. You must sign up in advance in order to participate.

Learn more at our website here

A while back we warned everyone that the future of The Poetry Marathon was uncertain, that we were not sure how we were going to proceed next year, if we were going to not do one in 2018 or if someone else would take on the bulk of the work with Jacob and I providing support and experience.

We had a lot of talented volunteers that wanted to help and take over the work. Many of them seemed fully capable and they may well have done a lot better job than us, but it became clear that narrowing down the candidates and training them would take a lot of work in and of itself.

So the long and the short of it is this – there will be no 2018 Poetry Marathon, and we know this makes many of you sad, and it also makes us sad. But we also know how much support we have from everyone going forward – and that is our plan – to go forward.

The reason we know for sure we will not be able to host or train anyone to take over for us in 2018 is a very exciting one, at least in our minds. Our second child is due May 28th, 2018.To have the marathon take place before than seems insane, and afterwards even more so.

In 2019 (barring the end of the world or other un-forseen developments) there will be a Poetry Marathon, that we run and that looks a lot like the ones that proceeded it.

The only thing we know will change is the anthology. Caitlin will still design the cover but we are going to look for a different editor, someone from within the Poetry Marathon group, someone who has participated in at least one Marathon before, and we will pay that editor.

We will be able to afford to pay this editor because the marathon anthology will be happening dependent on donations. We will set up a gofundme (or some such fundraising site) and set the goal at 500 dollars. That money will go to the editor. We hope everyone will help promote the page and that the anthology will happen because of it. There will still be no fees attached to the marathon. But this seemed like the only way to make the anthology sustainable.

The following year we will try and have someone work on the marathon 50/50 with us, and then that person (or persons, but no more than two) may take over from us, with the mandate to never charge for the marathon, and always keep it international.

Even though there won’t be an official marathon this year, but if you want to run or participate in an unofficial one, you have permission to use the blog, just drop us an email at poets@thepoetrymarathon.com. We won’t be offering much in the way of technical support/ feedback, but we should be able to help with the basics.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to comment here or send us an email at poets@thepoetrymarathon.com