The Poetry Marathon

Use one of the following three images as inspiration to write a poem.

Write a persona poem. A persona poem is when you write from the perspective of someone else; e.g. not your own perspective. That person can be imagined, or someone you know personally, or alternatively the poem can be from the perspective of a famous individual. That person can be alive or dead or even fictional.

Write a poem that belongs to a specific genre, ie: a science fiction poem, a fantasy poem, a romance poem, etc. . . Feel free to use cliches, or subvert them!

Write a poem about fishing. It doesn’t matter if you have never been fishing before. The poem must contain at least three lines that involve fishing. Everything else is up to you.

Write a poem that contains at least three of following five phrases.

“good morning”

“be honest”

“treasure island”

“soft moonlight”

“after hours”

Good Morning (or afternoon, or evening, depending on your time zone) poetry marathoners.

Below is your first prompt. Feel free to use it now, come back to it later, or ignore it entirely. Good Luck!

Your first prompt is to write a poem set entirely underwater.

Sign up here!

You must apply for the marathon before 9 pm ET.

Learn more about the marathon here!

Sign up here!

Learn more about the marathon here!

You must sign up by the 6th of June.

The second round of updates is here! First off we have a date when the sign up/application will go live. It will be June 2nd, otherwise known as next Tuesday.

Secondly, if you notice on the side our FAQ section and the About section have been updated.

Thirdly I can now share with you the designs for the poetry marathon certificates this year. The certificates will just be given out digitally this year as we are expecting a lot more participants but they will all be personalized with your name (and not say, W.H. Auden’s). The files will be high quality and easy to share digitally and/or print.

The 2015 Poetry Marathon will start on June 13th at 9am EST. This is a fact, but now we have another date and a lot of other information to reveal.

Participants can sign up for the half marathon or the full marathon like last year. Sign up should start within the next two weeks.

Sign up will happen through a short application process. Potential Marathoners will have to answer a very small number of questions and provide contact info. We will accept the bulk of applications, those rejected will be encouraged to re-submit. This process is just designed to eliminate anyone who is not seriously about completing the marathon or half marathon.

We will cap the number of participants at 500. We may not reach that number, but if we do, we will not accept additional participants for logistical reasons.

We will accept applications on a rolling basis, trying to respond to everyone within three days of their information being submitted.

At least a week before the Marathon everyone will be given access to a Facebook group (all previous participants are welcome to use last year’s group) and to a WordPress account on our main website. They will be encouraged to introduce themselves.

This year you can choose to be part of a group or groups on the Poetry Marathon website. There will be a Half Marathon group, a Full Marathon group, a few geographically oriented groups and you can even create your own group that can be public or private. The group page will make it easier to follow just a certain group of poets through the marathon. This is something we are experimenting with, so we are still trying to sort out the kinks here.

We are also very grateful to already have three volunteers to help us with the groups and with dispensing information. We are also looking for additional volunteers. Volunteers might find themselves in charge of a Facebook group, helping respond to applications, or addressing questions. If you are interested in volunteering, please email us at poets@thepoetrymarathon.com.

Regretfully we are not going to have an anthology this year. The main issue is that there will be too many participants for the anthology to include all participants.  We are also expecting our first child not long after the Marathon, so we will be rather busy. This makes the anthology logistically problematic. It may return next year but in a different, more curated form. We might run a featured poem (from the poetry marathon) program on the website for all of July.

We look forward to joining you in this year’s Poetry Marathon!