Hey, you! Do you like poetry? Do you like making things? Do you like challenges and the crushing weight of obligation inflicted by group pressure? Would you like to start liking one, some or all of these by spring of next year? Well, seeing how Escapril is dead and how I want to avoid the embarrassment of once more scrambling artlessly up the cliff face of an antiquated prompt list in utter solitude like some sort of loser, I propose EpigraMarch.
EpigraMarch will be a month-long poetry challenge In March of 2026 and possibly also in the years that follow. Every day, a prompt will be revealed on the website and/or by mailing-list and you'll have to write a poem or microfiction to suit it. These will be posted and discussed in all those places in which you would enjoy posting and discussing such things. There will be a list of participants, but also one of finishers, i.e. people who showed up and delivered each and every day. Inclusion on both lists is of course voluntary. It is equally voluntary for your pieces to be hosted on the official EpigraMarch website. An important difference to Escapril or Inktober (in addition to the prompt-list only being revealed one at a time) is that the list will be democratic. I looked at a lot of alternative prompt schedules people made and they all had too unified of a vibe. They had a clear aesthetic profile as opposed to offering something new and unexpected every day. Participating in EpigraMarch means that you will get to submit a few prompt ideas and vote on a few prompt ideas submitted by others. I will have a third party tally the votes and compile the finished list. I will be playing by the same rules as all other participants.
What may be submitted? Basically any piece of original short-form writing plausibly connected to the prompt. It does not have to rhyme, does not have to be in metre and does not have to be in English.
This sounds cool, but I've never written or posted poetry. I may never have written anything at all, so I guess I'll have to wait for some arbitrarily distant point in the imaginary future in which I feel more prepared, won't I? Not at all! Do you know how one becomes the sort of person who has done these sorts of things before? By doing them a first time. Everyone who has ever been competent at anything has at some earlier juncture done it a first time with no experience and no guarantees that the product would be remotely good. It is in your best interest to train the muscle which does anything at all — badly, scared and reliably. The person who writes thirty one "terrible" poems will have learned much more, and earned much more of my personal respect, than the person who wrote one banger on a day where they had lots of time and inspiration and chickened out on all the other days. If you want to, you can be anonymous or have your works not preserved anywhere, but if this sounds at all interesting to you, do it. No one will judge your inexperience. In fact everyone will think that you are incredibly cool and hot for powering through regardless.
Why isn't it in April? Because it's not entirely impossible that Savannah gets back to this or that someone else wants to pick up the mantle of a more true-to-form Escapril. I would not wish to compete with them. I also couldn't come up with as good of a portmanteau for April.
Why You? Because no-one else raised their hand in a way that I liked. Like many of my projects, this is mostly pragmatically motivated: There is a thing which I would prefer to exist and no-one else is making it. My amateurish flailing does not need to compare itself to the high standards of perfection, it merely needs to compare favourably to the actual alternative which is nothing at all and thus a rather shallow bar to clear. I will not be perfect at this, I will make mistakes and I endeavour to learn from them. I have never done this before, but someone should, so I might as well give it a try. I have a decent track record of being fairly good at the things I seriously attempt.
Explain the name please? An epigram is a pithy verse, poem or other witticism. March is a month of the year. The resulting portmanteau Epigramarch also phonologically contains "epigrammar", where a grammar delineates the structural rules of a natural language and the prefix "epi-" (epitaph, epicentre, epilogue, epitome etc.) usually means something like "upon" or "over". Poetry, or at least many types of it are the layering of additional rules and structures upon a given grammar.