This time tomorrow I’ll be 3 hours into my 6th 24 Hour Poetry Marathon (it begins 9am ET in the USA & about 500 people from all over the world participate).

A Poetry Marathon is exactly what it says on the box. Once an hour for 24 hours I’ll be attempting to churn out a poem (possibly using assigned prompts; maybe just using my own ideas) while attempting to stay focused, stay awake, stay sane, & occasionally, if a poem is completed relatively swiftly, grab a few moments kip here & there…

My goal is to finish (or at least progress) a Young Adult verse novel I’ve been playing with on & off for too many years. About 40 poems in the sequence have been created so far. There are multiple gaps in the narrative. My goal is to plug some of those gaps and hopefully incite a sense of momentum & motivation to spur me on to completing a first draft of a complete manuscript.

In previous years I’ve posted my 24 hour poems on this page (one of the requirements of the competition is a poem must be published every hour; ie you can’t write 4 in an hour, then sod off for 3 hours to play hockey). This year I won’t be publishing them here. This is because one day I would like said verse novel to be published. Having a large swathe of poems already online; albeit on a relatively innocuous little poetry page; could potentially be detrimental to said publication’s chances. So no go. I’ll still be posting on the group’s blog — but given that is closed to the public it doesn’t have the same issues.

That said, I still intend to post hourly snippets of poems, just 2-4 lines perhaps, the best bits as it were, taste tests, teasers, treats from each new poem. But in the interest of sanity, I intend to simplify things & post every teaser on one page, simply updating the same page every hour. Who knows, they might form their own meta-poem by the end of the day. (Or they might be a dog’s breakfast. We don’t yet know. But we will be 10pm Sunday. So hope you pop back occasionally & check it out.)