Sign up is now open for the 2024 Poetry Marathon! You can sign up here.
The 2024 Poetry Marathon starts at 9 AM ET on Saturday June 15th and will go till 9 AM ET on Sunday June 16th.
Those who are interested in doing a half marathon start at 9 AM ET on Saturday June 15th and go till 9 PM on that same day. Or they can start at 9 PM ET on the 15th and continue to 9 AM on the 16th, 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 9 PM ET on the 10th of June. We will get reach out to applicants on the 24th of May, and the 3rd and 11th of June, depending on when they apply. Most people who apply will be accepted. If you have not heard from us by the 12th of June please send us an email at poets@thepoetrymarathon.com. 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,…
On this page it says the marathon is June 15, but when I wen I clicked on the “learn more” it says the marathon is June 26. A little confusion here on my part.
Sorry! It’s on the 15th of this June! We fixed the date!
What is the objective and end ‘result’ for the half and full marathon?
Like all writing challenges our hope is that writers end up with new work that they love.
Often, especially with the full marathon, but it is true too with the half, you end up writing poems that would not have been created under any other circumstances, that are really powerful. Every single poem I’ve had nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net has been written during the marathon.
I’m curious about copyright and publication. Are large proportion of magazines consider posting a poem even on social media to be “previously published” so this would limit your market for later publication, as they’d be publicly accessible.
Generally a raw work such as a marathon produced poem would be edited substantively so as to become the pearl you want published. You could add special characters into your rough draft poem that even just removing them would make your submission unrecognizable to the web crawler bots. Also, consider writing in the marathon using an alias and a different email. << free and easy to register for if that's the route you take.
Sandra, all of the marathon posts have in the past had an option to private all of ones work right from the start, so it never would be shared publicly. I have checked with various editors over the years, and none have had any issue with this as long as work was marked as private from the start.
However, still, out of an abundance of caution, this year we are taking it a step further.
We are hosting it in a private member only space via Circle. The only people who can join, have had to sign up through the linked to form, and are accepted.
None of the work will be publicly accessible unless a member chooses to share their work elsewhere, which is always their choice.
Even the most stringent magazine I know of, (which doesn’t even publish poetry) is open to submissions of work that is only shared in private spaces where not anyone can join. Also what is being shared here for most people is very rough draft!
Would you like us to sign up somewhere to specify that we’re going to do the ‘first’ 12 or the ‘later’ 12 hours for the half …?
I’ve decided on the 1st 12 hour set.
If there’s a ‘place’ you need me to sign in for that let me know. Otherwise I’ll just plan to start then. J.
Thanks for asking! There’s no need to specify one way or the other!