making a post “sticky”

I’m using wordpress as a poetry archive, not as a blog, and so I want one post to be the “home/welcome” entry, if you know what I mean. How can I make a certain post stick above all the others? I don’t want to use that static page plugin, but if I had to…

Also, this is a stupid question, but how do I show the “5 latest posts” thing? Do I need a plugin?

One final question, how do I change the archive/category page to list the posts with JUST their title and not any of the text or dates?

Thanks so so much!