Welcome to the Plywood Canoe! This is the first-ever poetry ezine branded onto plywood with a woodburner. And here we are, heading up Shit Creek again, boldly seeking more quagmires to flounder about in. Never satisfied with more than enough trouble, we have added to our woes by initiating a zine-within-a-zine, a subzine, a parasitic growth upon the body poetic of SCR, an entity labelled "II". Yes, The Shit Creek Review has laboured and strained, and out has popped II - pronounced "Two" or "Too" or "To" or "Number Two" or "Eye-Eye" or "Aye-Aye", or "I and I", or what you will. But probably "Two".

II’s function is to provide an area of focus within the vaster free-range swamp of The Shit Creek Review; and so for example our inaugural II features the American poet Timothy Murphy, with a miniature treasure-trove of new poems by Tim, essays on him, and selections from his unpublished prosimetrum memoirs, Requited. We’ve even talked a few of his friends into sharing with us what Tim is really like up close and personal. Hair-raising stuff. You’d better get over to II and check it out – after you finish reading this editorial, of course. Click on the big II on the front cover of this issue.

In future issues of II we hope to feature other poets, Australian and British, as well as American, or any others that write in English. Today, Fargo, tomorrow, the World! But we also intend to focus on other areas as well, such as on themes for poets to write to. Our next issue of II, bundled into The Shit Creek Review, will be devoted to poems with a biographical bent, loosely interpreted; poems about Lives. See our Submissions page for more details.

Innovations keep surging into the Canoe of Poesy. Here’s another one: SCR is switching from Bi-monthly to Quarterly publication. This issue was held back to help synchronise that switch: we’ll publish in July, October, January and April. We won’t call them Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring editions though, because many of us are Southern Hemisphereans of the Antipodean persuasion, and we would become very disoriented under such a reversed seasonal nomenclature. SCR is making this switch because the work involved in getting SCR (now+II ) out every two months was leading to marriage breakdowns, fugue-states, delirium, loss of sanity and motor-function, and so forth. Think of us as basically lazy workaholics.

More innovation: we’re experimenting with editorial procedure, and beginning with this issue, the elite Poetry Editors (Nigel and myself) are generously allowing the Art Editor (Don) and Artist-in-Residence (Pat) to make the Artist’s Choice: they get to choose one poem a piece to go into SCR, and to tell us all why they chose it. As compensation for this noble surrender of power, Nigel and I will also pick a stand-out poem each from the current crop: so four poems each issue will receive special recognition – not for being superior to the others, but for particularly appealing to one or other of the editors in various ways. All bribes to the Shit Creek Anti-Corruption Committee please.

There you have it, then. Awash with innovations! A parasitic subzine, a devious avoidance of extra work, a switch to Quarterly, and new avenues for bribery for Editor’s Special Picks. Where the bloody hell can the canoe go from here?