Author's Publish hosts a POETRY MARATHON yearly, and it sounded like just what I needed to jumpstart my writing. What, you ask, is a Poetry Marathon? Just what it sounds like. Starting at 9 a.m. on June 15th, participants received prompts - a visual prompt inviting ekphrastic poetry and a text prompt. You could write to either - or neither - and you had an hour to work until your next prompt arrived.
As it didn't always take an hour to write a poem, I wrote others as well - about my cats, about a recent painting project in the house, and often in response to both prompts. I'd signed up only for a half marathon as I couldn't envision staying up all night writing poetry, but when 9 pm rolled around, I was still going strong and having the best time entrenched in writing after too long a hiatus, that I kept going.
Around midnight, I took the laptop to my bed, let myself drift off to sleep at will, which I did for a couple hours, and when I woke, I'd log on to get the latest prompts and kept on going. By 9 am on June 16th, I'd written more than 40 poems (many of them haiku, I admit), and some drafts I actually liked. They're worth revisiting and revising. I will definitely look forward to being a participant in The 2025 Poetry Marathon. Apparently, there were more than 400 crazy souls who joined Caitlin and Jacob Jans, the founders of Authors Publish in this wonderful writing adventure.