The First Annual Numéro Cinq Rondeau Writing Contest

Oct 272010
 

 

 

ENTRIES ARE OFFICIALLY CLOSED

Entries close midnight Sunday, November 21.

 

The First Annual Numéro Cinq Rondeau Writing Contest opens for entries November 1 (midnight tonight as of this writing). The rondeau is a slightly intricate little form (see preamble and definitions below). You should not attempt to write one under the influence of intoxicants or while using a cell phone (unless you are writing it on your cell phone). Also do not attempt to operate heavy machinery while composing your rondeau. Don’t shy away from trying a rondeau just because you consider yourself a rhyme & rhythm-challenged prose-writer. Fiction and nonfiction writers always need a dash of form in their lives, something to make them sit up straight (or just to jar the gears loose). As with all the NC contests, there is a method behind the madness. Beyond the discipline of form, we discover the freedom of aesthetic space. Every contest is a teaching moment, a formal lesson, and a moment of unleashing (paradoxical as that seems). Also, if you look at our previous contests, you will see that they are fun. Submit entries by typing them into the comment box beneath this post.

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Disperspective: Poem — William Hathaway

Sep 092010
 

William “Kit” Hathaway poem (see links at the bottom of the post for two other poems published on Numéro Cinq plus other Hathaway web presences) is an acute and generous reader. When I asked him for a new poem, he wrote back: “Here’s a poem that seems to fit with the fine Balgach poem, though I wrote it thinking about a Tony Hoagland essay in Poetry before I read ‘Fighting.'”

Just to add a little perspective, here is a paragraph excerpted from Kit’s entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

…he mixes tragedy and comedy to satirize and criticize himself, other poets, academia, and various other targets. This blending of tones and modes, along with his recent change to a more serious, wide-ranging satire, make him distinctive and may account for his high standing among his fellow poets, such as Albert Goldbarth and Norman Dubie, who have highly praised Looking into the Heart of Light (1988), with Dubie calling him “a great American poet.”

DISPERSPECTIVE

By William Hathaway

Yes, even for you
who weren’t here yet before
the traffic became too much, too always
and too loud to think, it is
what it is, even so. A saying you say
often that says no matter
what’s said nothing can change
what so relentlessly changes
and so the less said the better,
flipping open your phone,
beeping your car to life,
easing into the ceaseless rush.

A jackknife nests
in my pocket I’ve lost & found
so often for so long I’ve lost the story
of my feeling for it. When it’s lost,
nestled unbeknownst to me
in the crack of a dusty couch, is it
not lost until I miss it? No.
Yes, I’m always saying no
to you now. Look, I’ve found no
you’ll say when you listen.

There’s nothing to say
is the only thing left to say, you say.
So many amusing ways
to say this just by saying something
else before you finish saying
what you were saying. When night
falls and the road becomes
a gushing stream of light, out
creep dark creatures to eat
the dead swept up on the shores
of that river. Even without light
their eyes would blaze out
from black shapes into blackness.

— William Hathaway

See also “Bufflehead Dawn,” “Martin Points,” “Bitterness,” “Betrayal,” “The Poetry Career,” “Today.”

Author Interview with Adam Tavel in Poets’ Quarterly

Then think about this: Keats on Negative Capability

Sep 072010
 

This is an excerpt from Keats’ letter (Dec 21, 1817) to his brothers:

I spent Friday evening with Wells, and went next morning to see Death on the Pale Horse. It is a wonderful picture, when West’s age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no woman one feels mad to kiss, no face swelling into reality-The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth. Examine ‘King Lear’, and you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness-The picture is larger than ‘Christ rejected’.

I dined with Haydon the Sunday after you left, and bad a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith, and met his two Brothers, with Hill and King ston, and one Du Bois. They only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment-These men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their eating and drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter-They talked of Kean and his low company -Would I were with that Company instead of yours, said I to mvself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me and yet I am going to Reynolds on Wednesday. Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

dg

First Annual Numéro Cinq Aphorism Contest–And The Winner Is!

Apr 122010
 




The following is an email sent to dg from the anonymous contest judge who is in hiding, with his entire family and pets, somewhere in Argentina.

This was a tough go over the weekend for an indecisive judge. All the finalists were extremely good, very witty. In fact, the whole contest was a pleasant surprise–for the commentary as well as the entries. I loved Nina’s very short aphorism “A mapped world is always small” for its terseness; when you unpack it, the idea is huge–the unknown is always greater than the known. Steven Axelrod is a very witty man playing on glass houses, green houses and the greenhouse effect. (If there had been a prize for most prolific, he would have won; had their been a prize for the under-21 age group, Madeleine would have won.) C. M. Mayo’s entry grew and grew on me. I think I didn’t take it seriously at first because she was clearly just having fun with the contest, but she did an amazing little thing turning the idea of procrastination upside down (making it a pleasure instead of something to inspire guilt) with the egg and yolk idea. Gwen Mullins three-word line may not even be an aphorism precisely, but I liked the verbal play: fuck to effing to the letter f to the word “ineffable.” Natasha Sarkissian’s face entry was also a sleeper. It just kept staying in the mix as I found reasons to cut others out. It’s very clever: losing face, saving face, face lift, plastic surgery. Kit Hathaway is the old pro, the ringer. His aphorism worked as a rhyming couplet, but it also worked as a complex idea starting with the leap of putting Zoloft next to Nietzsche and coming up with the idea that they have a lot in common; Zoloft evens out the emotional peaks and valleys while Nietzsche delivered us from guilt and judgment (“neither bad nor good” plays off the title of Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil).

So I tried various criteria. Everyone was about equal on wit and verbal play. But when I asked myself about the profundity of the ideas behind the aphorisms, then Nina and Kit came out in front. Not that aphorisms have to be profound, but I was looking for some reason to separate the entries. Then I also tried to factor in syntactic and semantic complexity. I thought Kit had a slight edge there. But when it came to arrogance, Kit had a definite edge.

So by incremental calculations of relative value–even more Byzantine than hinted at here–I came to the conclusion that the winner is William Hathaway for his aphorism:

Zoloft does more than Nietzsche could
to make you feel neither bad nor good.

This is a preliminary announcement only. Press releases have gone out to major media. The winner was notified this morning by telephone and pronounced himself  “over the moon.” The actual award, along with a considerable financial emolument, will be presented in Stockholm to coincide with the lesser known, yet no doubt estimable in its own right, Nobel Prize for Literature.

The judge will remain anonymous. Any attempt to contact him will be reported to the police. The cat in the earlier post is not the judge’s cat; it was a professional model posing as the judge’s cat. Contractual arrangements outlined in the entry form protect the magazine, dg, his family and staff from civil actions pertaining to the contest. Entry fees were clearly stated to be non-refundable.

dg

First Annual Numéro Cinq Aphorism Contest Official Finalists

Apr 102010
 

The judge's cat, clearly suffering from intense Aphorism Contest anxiety

Yes, the death threats, the bribes, and blackmail have begun. The pressure on the judge is incredible at this point. How do you decide between one great entry and another? The judge is drinking vodka neat morning til night; he’s taken up smoking; he’s found a bottle of painkillers from his knee surgery (or possibly they are antibiotics for the dog). Nothing helps. He is thinking of just taking all the entry fees and prize money and flying to Mexico til this blows over.

I should add that the People’s Choice contest is a complete mess at this point with a three-way tie. Could someone please go to the post and break the tie?

dg

The Finalists



A loss of face requires more than plastic surgery to fix.
Natalia Sarkissian
——————
Zoloft does more than Nietzsche could
to make you feel neither bad nor good.
William Hathaway
—————–
In the egg of procrastination, there is the yolk of fun.
C.M. Mayo
————-
People who live in glass houses understand the greenhouse effect.
Steven Axelrod
——————-
A mapped world is always small.
Nina Alvarez
—————-
Fuck the ineffable.
Gwen Mullins


First Ever Numéro Cinq Literary Contest

Mar 152010
 

THE FIRST EVER NUMÉRO CINQ APHORISM CONTEST

Submissions March 15-31, 2010

Submit by commenting on this post

Submissions must be no more than 150 words in length

Do not enter a submission unless you have figured out what an aphorism is first

Wit and arrogance appreciated

Contest open to everyone including employees of Numéro Cinq, their significant others, children, and small pets

First Prize — Instant Worldwide (e)Publication w/ commentary

Plus honours & laurels

Bitterness: Poem — William Hathaway

Mar 132010
 

Hathaway

/

Bitterness

For sure that sea is bitter in its seethe
bitterly cold between cold black rocks
below us and one of us remarks
the wind shivering these scrawny aspens
into so much panic feels bitter and raw
across bare faces and I can tell you
if you were to pluck and chew just any
of these leaves around us you’d find
just how much more bitterness lies
beneath the skin of so many things
you thought you knew and so yes it’s true
these words taste bitter that we
are us no more but cold as the black sea
that seethes so raw behind cold eyes
and across hidden hearts frozen faces
never bare except beneath remarks
about weather that taste to us
each apart as savorless as the wind
we chew with every bitter word
fluttering like this monotonous uproar
of bitter leaves whose only fear
trembles in words we dare not say.

—William Hathaway

See also “Bufflehead Dawn,” “Martin Points“

Author Interview with Adam Tavel in Poets’ Quarterly

 

“Bufflehead Dawn” a poem by William Hathaway

Mar 012010
 

William “Kit” Hathaway is an old friend dating from my early days in Saratoga Springs when he taught at Union College and lived in a lovely house on Regent Street with his second son, Nate, and his daughter, Suzanne, a redoubtable high school rower who would join Kit and Steve Stern and me for our Tuesday night liver-and-onions blow-outs at Shirley’s Diner. Kit has published several books. Look him up. He lives in Maine now. We share, among other things, a love for Dalmatians, although he claims I tried to kill his poor deaf dog Lucy one extremely cold and cruel winter night eons ago. Full disclosure: My current Dalmatian is named Lucy.

dg

Bufflehead Dawn

Like so many skunk kits,
trooping one-two-three-four across
a broad golf course, the imperceptible
glide of buffleheads down the center
of this morning’s wrinkled cove
seemed to charm wavelets
only moving as a glimmer and firs
still as ghosts that darkly stand and stare
in mirrors into a full scene more
than merely scenery. But skunks
are skunks and ducks are not,
and to say God lurks in details does not
say God’s more parts than sum
or that seeming should be an end-all
of being, but merely that this mind
this morning once saw a line
of small black skunks waddle to and fro,
white tails flouncing side to side,
along a green, and a charm
like a gift is to see again
both buffleheads and skunks,
now and then, seize this dawn
in simple black and white.

 

William Hathaway

See also “Betrayal,” “The Poetry Career,” “Today.”