2016 Poetry Marathon Updates and Ideas
The Poetry Marathon continues to grow every year. Every year the diversity of the participants increase. In 2015 individuals living on 6 different continents participated. There were several mother daughter teams. The oldest poet was in their 80s, the youngest was in their teens. Experienced poets who had published books participated as did several people who had never really written poetry before.
During the marathon friendships and communities are formed that last much longer than the marathon itself.
However, what continues to surprise and impress me the most about the Marathon is the quality of work that it produces. By that I don’t mean edited and polished work. (One person dropped out this year because they hated looking at others typo riddled poems.) I mean the quality of the raw material, the poems before polishing.
This year the basics of the marathon will stay the same.
The Marathon will run from 9 am ET on August 13th till 9 am ET on August 14th. The half marathon will run from 9 am ET till 9 pm on August 13th. Each poet must write and publish on the blog one poem per hour.
We will have one central Facebook group where poets can meet and encourage each other, before, after, and during the event.
All of the poems will still have to be posted on the central website (although you can remove them as soon as the marathon is over).
Everyone has to register before the marathon in order to participate in the marathon.
Everyone who completes the half or whole marathon will receive a digital certificate to mark their participation.
This is still largely a two person operation. Jacob Jans handles most of the technical aspects of the Marathon and Caitlin Jans handles almost everything else. Keep this in mind when we make mistakes or cannot manage to do everything that we want to do. This is not a large non-profit, this is two poets (with a baby, a dog, and jobs) who try their best.
There will still be a prompt published every hour.
However there may be some changes.
We tried making groups on the website itself last year. Sometimes this was helpful, but mostly it was not. We are trying to find a better way to make that work, so if you have any ideas please tell us.
We are considering doing an anthology again. However, this is largely contingent on how many participants are involved. The anthology will be different from the 2014 anthology. It will most likely not include the work of everyone that submits and we would not be able to offer complimentary physical copies to all the contributors (however they would probably be available at cost and digital copies would be available for free). If you want another anthology to happen, even with these conditions in place, please encourage us in that direction.
We may or may not have a cap on the number of participants.
We may be accepting prompt submissions.
If you can think of any other changes we should or could make, please email us at poets@thepoetrymarathon.com
