Bring out your prose! [cough cough...]

EDITOR:
Bring out your prose!
[clang]
Bring out your prose!
[cough cough...]
[clang]
[...cough cough]
Bring out your prose!
[clang]
AUTHOR:
Here's one.
PROSE PIECE:
I'm not prose!
EDITOR:
'Ere. He says he's not prose!
AUTHOR:
Yes, he is.
PROSE PIECE:
I'm not!
EDITOR:
He isn't?
AUTHOR:
Well, he will be soon. He's very unpoetic.
PROSE PIECE:
I'm getting metrical!
AUTHOR:
No, you're not. You'll be stone-cold prose in a moment.
EDITOR:
Oh, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
PROSE PIECE:
I don't want to go in the Shit Creek Review!
AUTHOR:
Oh, don't be such a baby.
EDITOR:
I can't take him.
PROSE PIECE:
I feel fine!
AUTHOR:
Well, do us a favour.
EDITOR:
I can't.
AUTHOR:
Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
EDITOR:
No, I've got to go to Norman Ball's. He's written nine essays today.
AUTHOR:
Well, when's your next round?
EDITOR:
Thursday.
PROSE PIECE:
I think I'll go for a walk.
AUTHOR:
You're not fooling anyone, you know. Look. Isn't there something you can do?
PROSE PIECE: [singing]
I feel poetic. I feel poetic.
[EDITOR whacks PROSE PIECE on head!]
AUTHOR:
Ah, thanks very much.
EDITOR:
Not at all. See you on Thursday.
AUTHOR:
Right. All right.
[howl]
[clop clop clop]
AUTHOR:
Who's that, then?
EDITOR:
I dunno. Must be a king.
AUTHOR:
Why?
EDITOR:
He hasn't got shit all over him.


Interpretation: This enigmatic passage seems to be a cryptic call from the editors of SCR+II for prose submissions.

We are after well-written prose essays, surveys, memoirs, close reads, rants, hot gossip - what you will, as long as it relates to our core focus of Poetry.

We are particularly interested in the sorts of prose mentioned above that relate to the topic of 'Lives' - our theme for the July edition of our subzine II.

This could include profiles with a biographic bent of particular poets or poetic couples (think Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath*). Poets who tend to write about characters, such as Robert Browning, would be a suitable subject. Poems about a life or lives could be given a close analysis. Look, I can't do all your thinking for you. Get out there and have a bit of a ponder of your own, then write up a storm on some aspect of poetry as relates to 'Lives', or some aspect of 'Lives' as relates to poetry. The possiblities are endless. Type away like fury, bung it in an email and whizz it off to shitcreekreview@yahoo.com before 21st May, 2007 - extension to 21st July 2007! It may be a couple of paragraphs or a major essay, depending on your powers of endurance.

Can you do it? Are you writer enough? Or are you going to wooss out again?

Real poets write prose as well!

----

Footnote

* No, no, no! Don't think Sylvia and Ted! Check the comments section! Think G. Valerius Catullus and Lesbia, John Keats and Fanny Brawne, John Skelton and Mistress Margaret Hussey, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, Petrarch and Beatrice, Simon and Garfunkel, Tin Tin and Snowy...

SCR #2 now in Acrobat PDF

Available for download here: Past Issues.

SCR + II pdfs

Thanks to the splendid efforts of Peter Bloxsom we can now offer Acrobat Reader pdf files of The Shit Creek Review + II for contributors and readers to download as a more permanent and portable copy of the site. I recommend Peter to anyone who wants to achieve a professional-quality website or e-book.

The pdfs are not exactly the same as the website in graphics but include the same textual content, many of the original images and much of the original look - better than any similar pdf version of a website that I've seen.

So far we have SCR+II #3 available, and issue #2 is nearly finished. Eventually we hope to have all issues including each current issue available as pdf download. A longer term goal is to offer printed annual versions, probably via Lulu.

Download your pdf of SCR #3 from the Past Issues page.

SCR Info Bulletin: Free Broadband via "Dark Porcelain" technology

The Norwegian Agent (Code Name "Chippy") of the Shit Creek R & D Ministry has alerted us to the breakthrough in toilet-bowl internet access available fee from Google's TiSP service. Those Shit Creekers lucky enough to have flush toilets made of porcelain are encouraged to explore this information super-conduit-throughput technology which accelerates data dumps past the notorious S-Bend bottleneck, previously an irritating source of clogged access to Internet poetry sites.

From the profits of the amazingly lucrative poetry zine industry I have built a rambling luxury estate in the Australian outback, "Paradis sur Merde" (modelled on the late Sir Frank ("The Bank") Renouf's "Paradis sur Mer" on Sydney Harbour) - but to maintain the note of outback authenticity and to combat climate change I have insisted that all toilets be located outdoors, several minutes walk from the main buildings, and constructed on shakey stretcher planks spanning five-metre deep drop pits. To encourage users out of their comfort zones, there is an inbuilt structural feature that occasionally plunges them, mid-effort and selected on a random basis, into the collection pit. The TiSP technology unfortunately is not yet applicable to this type of installation.

Thanks, Chippy, for the heads-up!