Our 11th annual Unclassifiable Contest ran from May 1 to July 31, 11:59 P.M. EST.
Challenged by Diaghilev to astonish him (“Etonnez-moi!”), Cocteau responded with an “unclassifiable” ballet: music by Satie, sets and costumes by Picasso, book by himself. The year: 1910. In this age of branding and marketing, can such “unclassifiable” works survive? What is gained—or lost—when boundaries are blurred?
Our Unclassifiable contest is for works that blur, bend, blend, erase, or obliterate genre and other labels. We consider works of up to 5,000 words. Michael Martone judges our Unclassifiable contest.
Of the winning piece, judge Michael Martone said,
“I like that this piece is platform dependent during this election year and about ‘information’ and its implosion and explosion as well as the rise of AI. Just seemed to me a fruitful place to be and to get lost fruitfully in. It is a word camouflage camouflaging words, an attack of drones, droning sentences that explode columns of invading meaning, manic syntax indeed!”
2024 Winner
Big Hark, “Select Reddit Posts from the Three Months Following My First Hypomania,” which will appear on the Arts & Letters website in Spring 2025.
2024 Finalists
John Bateman, “Double Helix”
Robin Van Impe, “Across, Down,” “How I lost you: in text bubbles, in the greenhouse, in the Venus Flytrap,” and, “-,-,____”
Unclassifiable Judge
Michael Martone’s newest book is Table Talk & Second Thoughts: A Memoir in Prose Poems. Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana (Baobab Press) and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone (BOA Editions) appeared recently. Retired after forty years of teaching at Iowa State, Harvard, Syracuse, and the University of Alabama, he lives in Tuscaloosa next to the abandoned gothic country club featured in Walker Percy’s novel Love in the Ruins.
The Unclassifiable Contest submissions
are now closed.
