Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The Travellin' Shit Creekers


The Shit Creek Review's January issue will have the theme of Travelling. Poets may submit verse related in some way to that topic. Poems submitted can refer to imaginative, mental, emotional or spritual journeys as well as physical ones. Or the whole lot simultaneously if you like. Surprise us! The deadline for submissions is December 3rd. Submission gudelines may be found here:

SCR Submissions

Writers who have featured in recent Shit Creek Reviews include

-Tom Sheehan who has nine Pushcart nominations and numerous published books,

-Claudia Gary, published in The Formalist, Light Quarterly, The Lyric, Orbis, Pivot, and Edge City Review),

-C.E. Chaffin, much-published former editor of the Melic Review,

-Alison Brackenbury, author of numerous books, whose Carcanet collections include Dreams of Power (1981), Breaking Ground (1984), Christmas Roses (1988), Selected Poems (1991), 1829 (1995), After Beethoven (2000) and Bricks and Ballads (2004), whose poems have been included on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and whose 1829 was produced by Julian May for Radio 3; her work recently won a Cholmondeley Award,

-C.B. Anderson of the PBS series Victory Garden,

-John Whitworth, author of ten books of poetry, who has been a reviewer of poetry for Poetry Review and a general reviewer for The Spectator, and whose poems have appeared in most of the leading poetry journals and magazines as well as in The Times and the Arts pages of The Independent,

-Kirk Nesset, Pushcart prizewinner whose poems and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, The Sun, Fiction, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere,

-Rhina Espaillat, who has published numerous poetry books and translations and is a Nemerov Prize winner,

-A.E. Stallings, author of numerous books and translations, who has appeared in The Best American Poetry series (1994 & 2000) and has received numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize (1997) and the Frederick Bock Prize (2004) from Poetry, the James Dickey Prize from Five Points, and the Nemerov Sonnet Award,

-Wendy Videlock, whose work has appeared in Poetry, Pivot, The Lyric, The Susquehanna Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, The NeoVictorian/Cochlea and The Eleventh Muse,

-Kirby Wright, who has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a past recipient of the Ann Fields Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Award, the Browning Society Award for Dramatic Monologue, the San Diego Book Award, and Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowships in Poetry and The Novel

-Alan Sullivan who translated Beowulf with Timothy Murphy for A.B. Longman, and who has had poems in many venues, including The Hudson Review, Poetry, The Formalist, and Chronicles,

-Kei Miller, the author of The Fear of Stones and Other Stories (Macmillan 2006) and Kingdom of Empty Bellies (Heaventree 2005) whose new collection of poetry There Is An Anger That Moves, will be published by Carcanet in 2007 alongside an anthology New Caribbean Poetry which he edited,

-Tim Murphy who translated Beowulf with Alan Sullivan for Longman Cultural Editions, and whose most recent book of poetry is Very Far North, Waywiser Press (London), 2002,

R.S. Gwynn, who has published and edited numerous books and anthologies,

-Bob J. Clawson who has published work in journals as diverse as the Southern Review and Yankee, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Lancet, whose poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal and Poet Lore.and who for the past seven years has managed the annual Robert Creeley Award in Acton, Massachusetts, where Creeley grew up,

-And of course, William McGonagall III, retired Arbroath haddock-smoker and great-grandson of the celebrated William Topaz McGonagall!

-And many more!

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Sixties Suitcase


Are you considering traveling down Shit Creek next issue? Better book your ticket early.



Saturday, October 20, 2007

She Loved The Horror


Table for One With a View for Two

A temporary plaster, mixed media
installation on the Mendocino
Headlands in northern California.
Parts of her still exist close by. : )

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Just when you thought it was safe to read poems again...

Monday, October 15, 2007

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night


when you last heard from me.
I am Horrored out...truth be known. : )

Sunday, October 14, 2007

You Can't Say We Didn't Warn You...


Saturday, October 13, 2007

Listen to Your Familiars


The Horror is near...
Familiars
Minor demons who, at Satan's command, become the servants of a human wizard or witch. It is one of the distinctive features of English witchcraft that these spirits were very often thought to take the form of small animals, such as would be found around farms and homes; some witches claimed to have received them directly from the Devil, others from a relative or friend. One account of 1510 concerns a schoolmaster at Knaresborough (Yorkshire), who allegedly kept three spirits in the form of bumble bees and let them draw blood from his finger; he was attempting to locate treasure by magic. According to a pamphlet of 1566, two women on trial at Chelmsford (Essex), had successively owned a white spotted cat named ‘Satan’; in return for a drop of blood, it had brought them possessions and caused people who had offended them to fall sick and die. The first woman had been given ‘Satan’ by her grandmother when she was 12 years old, with instructions to feed him on bread and milk and keep him in a basket— unusual luxury, probably, for an Elizabethan cat. In such cases, there seems no reason to doubt that the animals described did actually exist, and became the subject of gossip and suspicion.Many other references can be found; there were said to be familiars in the forms of cats, dogs, toads, mice, rabbits, flies, or grotesque creatures of no known species. They were commonly called ‘imps’, a word which combined the meanings of ‘child’ and ‘small devil’. They were thought to suck blood or milk from the witch, causing growths on her face or body which looked like nipples; by the 17th century these were generally thought to be near the genitals or anus.In rural tales and beliefs of later centuries, mice and toads are the familiars most commonly mentioned. Supposedly the witch sent them to bring misfortune on her enemies; in Somerset tales, witches are quoted as threatening, ‘I'll toad 'ee!’ It was believed that a witch could not die before passing them on to someone else, thus transferring both her power and her guilt. In anecdotes from Sussex and Essex in the 1930s, people alleged that mice had appeared at the deathbed of some local wizard or witch of a previous generation, who persuaded a reluctant relative to ‘inherit’ them. At West Wickham (Cambridgeshire) it was said that in the 1920s a witch tried to rid herself of her imps by putting them in the oven, but it was she, not they, who got burned; eventually they were buried with her (Simpson, 1973: 76; Maple, 1960: 246-7).Thomas, 1971: 445-6, 524-5; Sharpe, 1996: 70-4.
Best give yours a bit of kidney for protection tonight...

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Best Watch Your Wake


The Horror is next...

Sunday, October 07, 2007

The Chimaera Erect


The Chimaera has arrived. It has crawled out of the primeval sludge of The Shit Creek Review and and now runs on its own four heterogeneous paws, gallivanting across the fields and foothills of Poetry and Prose which border on Mounts Parnassus and Helicon, and around the Lycian Way.

There is more real poetry here than you could shake a lyre at, and vigorous prose discussions too, as well as entertaining true fictions. We have picked what we think is the very best from a huge volume of submissions, and the result is a curious and provocative mix of styles, preoccupations and perspectives. We chose the work that appealed to us most, based entirely on high quality as we saw it.

To give a roll-call of authors in our first issue would be tedious and spoil the fun of exploring for yourself. And there are other mysteries for you to uncover, too: What is the magical Poem of the Day? How does being an Expat relate to being a poet? Who will win the William McGonagall Prize for Chimerical Verse? How can garlic bread be fraught with danger?

So pull on your Corinthian helmet, hop onto your faithful Pegasus and fly on over to http://www.the-chimaera.com to find out for yourself!

And mark you this: The Chimaera's next issue will accept general prose and verse submissions, as well as articles, essays and poems for a Translation special feature. Read the Submissions page for details:

http://www.the-chimaera.com/Submissions.html

Oh, by the way: expect something rather toxic and nasty from The Shit Creek Review's Horror Department soon--very soon.

It's Worth the Wait...


Thursday, October 04, 2007

Keep An Eye Out for The Horror


Monday, October 01, 2007

October Eve