The Poetry Marathon

The 2014 Poetry Marathon is over!

If you just completed the Marathon – Congratulations! We are impressed.

You just wrote a lot of poems. An impressive and exhausting number. Hopefully you can give yourself a bonus today (like a dozen naps, or a really delicious slice of chocolate cake).

If you completed the marathon please send us an email (at poets@thepoetrymarathon.com) with your name, email address, and mailing address (for us to mail the certificate of completion to). There is no rush. Recover first, then send us an email.

In the next week or so we will be in contact with you about the forthcoming anthology chapbooks. Only poets who completed the marathon will be eligible for inclusion in the chapbook. All poets who are in the chapbook will get a complimentary copy shipped to them.

Thank you for joining us in our poetry madness!

This is the very last hour and the very last prompt. I am so impressed by everyone that made it this far!

The last prompt is very simple – write a self portrait.

Write a poem using one of the  phrases as your title:

Clown Car

Children Fled Like Moths

The Gypsy Curse

3 Am Pancakes

Write a poem that relies on heavy repetition of the same words or phrase.

Write about your mother’s clothes.

We are in the home stretch! There is light at the end of the tunnel.

Your prompt is to write a poem that contains a metaphor involving food. The metaphor could be an aside or it could be the focus of the poem. The choice is up to you.

For hour nineteen write a sonnet.

Caesar Crossing the Rubicon by Wilhelm Trubner, is one of my favorite paintings. Unlike most paintings of titled Caesar Crossing the Rubicon does not feature an army led by Caesar, instead it is a painting of a dog eying food on a table. I have posted it below.

Your prompt is to write a poem with a stereotypical title for a poem or painting, but the poem itself does not comply with the expectations raised by the title.

For your seventeenth prompt I want you to write a poem about solitude. It could be a poem about solitude under normal circumstances or it could be a poem about extreme solitude, for example being a hermit, or the last person on a life boat.

Architecture figures into a lot of poets work. Stephen Dunn and a number of poets work comes to mind. For this prompt I want you to write a poem about a specific building. It can be in purely visual terms or it can use metaphorical language, or it can be part of a larger narrative.

Below I included two photos of the Brain for inspiration.The Brain is a studio in Seattle, Wa.