The Poetry Marathon

For the third year in a row we are offering word and image prompts. The first prompt every hour will be text based (with occasional variations), and the second, if you scroll down, will be image based. You can choose either prompt or not use prompts at all (or only sporadically). All images are either taken from unsplash, or contributed by a poetry marathoner with credit.

Text Prompt:

Lately I’ve been finding a lot of inspiration in the work of others.

Often when I read a poem, there will be a line (or 5) that sounds spectacular and presents a really interesting idea, but then doesn’t explore it.

One of these lines is from the  poems Selkie Weaning Young (Redux) by Diana Khoi Nguyen. The line that particularly stands out to me as containing multitudes is: “This is how she found us/ the past draped about us like a cloak”

You can read the whole poem (it’s short!) to see if there is another jumping off point for you, but if you do end up using the line in your poem, make sure to say “after Diana Khoi Nguyen” in a right alligned line after the title. That way the original poet still receives credit for their idea.

Image prompt:

Photo credit, Birk Enwald

This is the last day to sign up for the 2023 Poetry Marathon! You can sign up here. We will be sending out the final round of acceptances tomorrow. If you do not here from us tomorrow, please send us an email at poets@thepoetrymarathon.com

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. You can catch up if you miss an hour, but you cannot get ahead.

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 find out how to convert your timezone go here.

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

We will get back to applicants on a rolling basis. Most people who apply will be accepted. If you have not heard from us three days after applying please send us an email at poets@poetrymarathon.com. Please do not try and contact us through the FB page.

Sign up is now open for the 2023 Poetry Marathon! You can sign up here.

The 2023 Poetry Marathon starts at 9 AM ET on Saturday September 2nd and will go till 9 AM ET on Sunday the 3rd of September.

Those who are interested in doing a half marathon start at 9 AM ET on September 2nd and go till 9 PM on that same day. Or they can start at 9 PM ET on the 2nd and continue to 9 AM on the 3rd, which works better for some time zones.

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. You can catch up if you miss an hour, but you cannot get ahead.

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 find out how to convert your timezone go here.

There is a new prompt offered every hour. Some find this Helpful, some ignore it completely.

To learn more go here.

To sign up go here.

If you are interested in participating please sign up by the 28th of August. We will get reach out to applicants on the 11th, the 18th, and the 29th of August depending on when they apply. Most people who apply will be accepted. If you have not heard from us by the 30th of August. Please do not try and contact us through the FB page. We will  try our best to make sure everyone who contacts us, gets an opportunity to participate.

We’ve always struggled a little with how to make the anthology work. When there were fewer Poetry Marathoners, it was a hard but sustainable effort. As the marathon grew, we realized we’d have to change our strategic approach to it. That’s why we started to pay guest editors. This helped a little bit, but with Amazon’s continual shifts in terms of how they were running their print on demand operations, things were still fairly complicated. With increasing participants and submissions the anthology become even more unwieldy and increasingly expensive for us to publish and for any of the contributors to get their hands on.

Last year, Jacob and I discussed stopping the Anthology entirely, but decided instead to try and see if hiring two editors made the job more manageable. It very much did help, but it wasn’t enough in the end, and even after hiring others to help with layout the project took much longer than expected, with many things going wrong and the whole process was very expensive. For reasons that Amazon has never disclosed, they still haven’t distributed it properly this year and it is only available on the UK version of the website. Although if you are in Canada, Indigo has it available for order, finally.

It hasn’t helped that we’ve been running a time consuming business (which has made funding all this possible), and have had to face a wide range of personal issues this year.

The anthology was not part of my original vision for the Poetry Marathon, but I have always been grateful for Jacob coming up with the idea, because it is many individual’s first experience with submission and publication and because I love the range and creativity of work in the anthologies.

We’ve put a lot of thoughts into next steps, and we’ve also gotten some very thoughtful feedback from the community on this.

This year is going to be the last time (for the foreseeable future) that we officially put out a Poetry Marathon Anthology, and it’s going to be a little different.

Blessing Omeiza Ojo, a gifted poet and a long time participant in the marathon, will be the editor of this anthology and he will pick between 80-100 poems to publish in the anthology. This means that for the first time submissions will have to be rejected, which is something we were reluctant to do, because our priority with the marathon is to be as open as possible to all.

That being said, based on community feedback, and hopefully with community support, we are asking anyone who is interested in helping edit/produce/publish a digital/online version of the anthology, reach out to us at poets@thepoetrymarathon.com.

Our greatest hope is that someone will put together a board of sorts to support the Poetry Marathon Anthology in the future. This year their focus will only be on curating a digital anthology that hopefully reflects the voices of all poetry marathoners, but going forward they might end up running the Poetry Marathon Anthology as a separate but related entity.

We are very grateful for the insight the community has already provided into this shift, and while we know this change hasn’t been ideal or perfect for anyone (ourselves included), we know that it has to be made. It’s more than the cost for us, but the time and effort we put into the Marathon is already great – and that’s where our focus really needs to be moving forward. The event itself is very much our priority and focus.

We welcome feedback and thoughts on these developments, and we are grateful as always for the community that makes the marathon possible.

We will open up to applications for the 2023 Poetry Marathon on August 7th and stay open till August 28th. We except to say yes to all serious applicants, as we do every year.

The marathon itself will take place on September 2nd and 3rd. The first half marathon and full marathon will start at 9 AM ET, and the second half marathon will start at 9 PM ET. The marathon as a whole will be over on September 3rd at 9 AM.

Save the date! The 2023 Poetry Marathon will start on September 2cd at 9AM ET and go to September 3rd 9AM. The half marathon will end on September 2cd at 9PM.

Submissions to the 2022 Poetry Marathon Anthology are open now and will stay open through Friday, the 22nd of July! For the first time the anthology will have two different editors. Make sure you submit to the right editor.

Ofuma Agali, is this year’s full marathon editor. He is a 44 years old writer and editor based in Lagos, Nigeria. His works have appeared in Nigerian publications – Post Express Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Vanguard, and National Mirror – as well as in publications in other climes – Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Praxis Journal of Gender & Cultural Critiques, The Kalahari Review, and The Purposeful Mayonnaise. He has also written a full-length published collection of poems, If We Are Willing The Earth Will Listen (2017). A revised version of this is ready for publication later this year. He holds a first degree in physics from the University of Uyo and a post-graduate diploma in marketing management from the Lagos State University. He has written two unpublished collections of short fiction and has several works in progress, including a collection of poems and a collection of short fiction.

The following guidelines are for Full 24 Hour Marathoners only. Read the guidelines carefully before submitting. The anthology is only sustainable if people follow the guidelines.

When you submit you must include in the email the following:

1. The subject line should state “Full Marathon Submissions”. (If you are a half marathoner, do not follow these guidelines. Instead, refer to the Half Marathon submission guidelines.)
2. The body of the email should start with your location.
3. It should also include the hour of the marathon the poem was written in.
4. As well as a link to your poetry marathon page. If your poetry marathon name is different than your name, include both and make it clear which name you want to appear in the anthology.
5. Two poems pasted into the body of the email. All submissions must include two poems, no more, no less.

All full 24 hour marathon submissions must be emailed to: poetrymarathonsubmissions@gmail.com

DO NOT email us at the email address we use for all other communications or to the half marathon address if you are a full marathoner!

Also take note of the following additional information:

• DO NOT email us at the email address we use for all other communications or to the half marathon address if you are a full marathoner!
• One poem will be chosen per poet to be featured within the anthology; the only exception to this is if your poems contain hate speech or are illegible.  In both cases, we will reach out to you directly.
• Due to issues that happened in the past, no one is allowed to announce that their poem has been accepted for publication until Thursday, the 1^st of September, unless notified otherwise. Announcements made on the marathon groups before September 1st will be deleted.  Please do not query about the status of your submission via email or the FB page until after September 1^st.

Thank you for following the guidelines! I know they might seem strict but they make it possible to put together an anthology in a few months. The anthology should be published before Christmas. Last year a lot of people did not follow the guidelines and we experienced significant slow down because of this. The anthology is only sustainable if people follow the guidelines.

After the poems are published in the anthology, all rights return to you.

Digital copies will be made available for free to any contributor. Print copies will be available for a reasonable price and any money that is made from selling the anthology will go towards covering the cost of the marathon.

Submissions to the 2022 Half Poetry Marathon Anthology are open now and will stay open through the 22nd of July! For the first time the anthology will have two different editors. Make sure you submit to the right editor.

This year’s Half Marathon Editor Cristy Watson is an award-winning author of eight novels for MG and YA readers. She loves entering writing contests and was thrilled to receive Editor’s Choice in the CV2, 2-Day Poem Contest in 2013. She also regularly participates in the Poetry Marathon in June, and she has a poem in an important and timely new anthology, ‘Worth More Standing’ (Caitlin Press; Christine Lowther, editor). She also volunteers at the Surrey International Writer’s Conference and was recently Committee Chair for Wise Words through the BC Federation of Writers. She completed a manuscript evaluation for an author through The Writers Union of Canada, as well as helping to previously judge their short fiction contest, and in the past few years, she has assisted writers of fiction, non-fiction, memoir, and poetry. You can find her here: cristywatsonauthor.wordpress.com

The following guidelines are for Half Marathoners only. Read our guidelines carefully before submitting. The anthology is only sustainable if people follow the guidelines.

All poems submitted must be written during the 2022 Half Marathon, and the writer must have completed the Half Marathon in 2022.

All poems should be completely edited and as much as possible contain no major grammatical errors. Revisions are allowed and encouraged before submitting. Please check your punctuation. All poems should be single spaced. Any extra space will probably be interpreted as a stanza break. The first word of every line should not have a capitalization unless it is intentional.

When you submit you must include in the email the following:

1. The subject line should state “Half Marathon Submissions”. (Full 24 hour marathoners: see the guidelines here.)
2. The body of the email should start with your location.
3. Then include the hour of the half marathon the poem was written in.
4. As well as a link to your poetry marathon page.
5. Two poems pasted into the body of the email. All submissions must include two poems, no more, no less.

Please follow all these guidelines. Use the above list as a checklist for your email submission and only press send once you’ve reviewed it twice.

All half marathon submissions must be made via this email address: halfmarathonsubmissions@gmail.com

DO NOT email us at the email address we use for all other communications or to the full marathon address if you are a half marathoner!

One poem will be chosen per poet to be featured within the anthology, the only exception to this is if your poems contain hate speech or are illegible.  In both cases we will reach out to you directly. Please do not query about the status of your submission.

Due to issues that happened in the past, no one is allowed to announce that their poem has been accepted for publication till September 1st, unless notified otherwise. Announcements made on the marathon groups before September 1st, will be deleted.

Thank you for following the guidelines! I know they might seem strict, but they make it possible to put together an anthology in a few months. The anthology should be published before Christmas. Last year a lot of people didn’t follow the guidelines and we experienced significant delays because of this. The anthology is only sustainable if people follow the guidelines.

After the poems are published in the anthology all rights return to you.

Digital copies will be made available for free to any contributor. Print copies will be available for a reasonable price and any money that is made from selling the anthology will go towards covering the cost of the marathon.

Dear Poets,

Here’s our initial list of everyone who successfully finished the Full 2022 Poetry Marathon. These poets wrote 24 poems in 24 hours. Congratulations to everyone who achieved this incredible challenge! You are amazing!

Please note: This list contains errors. We need your help to correct those errors. If your name is in the wrong list, or missing, when it should be there, please let me know! This was in no way intentional. (There are so many participants, it is very difficult to create an accurate list.)

See the list of Half Marathon Finishers here.

Thank you to everyone who participated this year!

— Jacob