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Editorial

Beyond Shit Creek by Paul Stevens

“What lies beyond Shit Creek?” you ask.

Well, lots of things; but beyond Shit Creek, the stream leads to Two, too.

Two, or more classically II, is the parasitic subzine which has attached itself to The Shit Creek Review. II’s function is focus. While The Shit Creek Review will be a generally open-slather kind of venue, publishing free-range poems, art and criticism, II will be devoted to particular themes and features. For example, in the next II, we will have the theme of “Lives”, asking you to submit poems relating to a biographical theme: poems about the life of. You can interpret that theme as loosely as you like, and of course you can still submit poems on all sorts of other themes to the host zine, The Shit Creek Review. Look for more details on The Shit Creek Review's Submissions page.  

As well as devoting individual issues of II to themes for poets, we will also use them occasionally to focus on the work of one particular poet. For our inaugural edition of II the featured poet is Timothy Murphy.

I first came across Timothy Murphy’s poetry on the internet poetry forum Eratosphere, and I found it a bit challenging. I could tell that this poetry was very well written, but it seemed to be concerned with themes and especially perspectives that I found rather problematic: guns, weapons, hunting and slaying, and general red-neckery. Not my usual cup of tea at all; and we don’t like our prejudices challenged, do we?

Well, of course, challenging our prejudices (in the widest sense) is exactly what poetry should do, and I found that increasing familiarity with Tim’s work made me increasingly empathetic with the reality of North American Midwestern farmers and their world. People who know me will realise that is a very large leap indeed; yet that’s what happened. And isn’t that among the things poetry should do: open up new worlds for us? Show us fresh ways of looking at things? Widen our imaginations? Provoke our identification with that which is opposite?

What helped me immensely in this process was that technically the verse written by Tim Murphy is very much in the tradition and style that I already loved. My university degree is in Early English Literature and Language: I studied Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Ploughman, and other texts in the accentual-alliterative tradition and beyond through to the late Middle Ages. Among my half-dozen favourite poets is John Skelton. And this is the very tradition which Tim consciously and squarely placed himself firmly in, and which shapes the music and the vision of his verse.

So that resonance made my leap of appreciation easier; as did my personal dealings with Tim. In selecting and preparing poems of his for The Shit Creek Review issue #2, and then later preparing this first issue of II, Tim and I developed quite an extensive correspondence by email. Through that correspondence I came increasingly to appreciate and value Tim as a person, for his qualities of kindness, patience, resourcefulness and sincerity with which he unfailingly treated me and my work, including the inevitable problems that arose. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they handle problems. Tim came through shining.

I sense the same attitude to Tim among the people I asked to contribute to this Tim Murphy edition of II. They love him. That alone tells us the most important thing about Tim Murphy. In plain Australian: He’s a bloody good bloke.