Winter Update 2024-25

people on road with buildings painting

Congreve Street, Birmingham, showing Christ Church and the Town Hall, By Laurence J Hart

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Editorial Introduction

Welcome to a magazine in transition! For fifteen years, under the inspired leadership of Denis Boyles, The Fortnightly Review has been an online haven for some of the most inspired and idiosyncratic trans-Atlantic poetry, literature, and commentary written today. His passing in late 2023 left the future of the enterprise in question; as Associate Editor Katie Lehman has put it, “Denis was Fortnightly.” But I am thrilled to announce, thanks to the generosity and good will of Denis’ family, especially his daughter Maggie Boyles, that TFR will continue in its mission, even as it takes new forms.

I am pleased to welcome TFR alum Marc Vincenz, the publisher of MadHat Press, to our masthead as Translations Editor; Marc is also the new editor and publisher of our Odd Volumes series. Our new Fiction Editor, Christina Milletti, will bring an exciting new emphasis on innovative and unsettling fiction to the magazine. And I am delighted to name Paige Blackburn, the steampunk-style engineer who keeps our gears turning, as our new Managing Editor. I am grateful as well that so many of the remarkable folks on TFR’s masthead, including Poetry Editors Robert Archambeau and Peter Robinson, have agreed to continue to help us discover and publish the best new writing from the U.K., the USA, and across the globe.

Though TFR will continue as a website, we believe that the future of the magazine lies in delivering new poetry, fiction, translations, and commentary directly to subscriber’s inboxes in the form of a Substack. These subscriptions are free to all, though we will be offering premium subscriptions to those who wish to support our work. Sign up today!

While we get the new magazine up and running (picture us scurrying about in top hats and goggles, adjusting pneumatic tubes with giant wrenches), please enjoy this winter update, headed up by Norman Finkelstein’s moving elegy for the late Tyrone Williams. Other highlights include a new installment of Mark Scroggins’ long poem Zion Offramp; four prose poems by the Belgian surrealists Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray, translated by Robert Archambeau and Jean-Luc Garneau; a new excerpt of Anthony Howell’s epic poem The Runiad; poems by Frank Nims, Kelvin Corcoran, Elaine Randell, Alistair Noon, and Paige Blackburn; Sally Connolly’s brilliant essay on David Melnick’s elegiac sequence A Pin’s Fee; and Alessandro Cortello’s review of Michelene Wandor’s new experimental novel, Orfeo’s Last Act.

The Fortnightly Review is dead; long live The Fortnightly Review!

—Joshua Corey, Editor-in-Chief

I. Norman Finkelstein | Elegy: Tyrone Williams

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A Tomb for Tyrone Williams

Hauntology: the study of things that are
gone but are still there; the study of the
invisible powers that move us, control us,
or perhaps free us, body and soul.

II. Frank Nims | Two Poems

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Walking Down First Avenue the Other Day, They Were Tearing Down That Place We Used to Hang Out All the Time When It Was New

And we went together as well
as Bobby Hackett and Lee Wiley
as black coffee and an ocean breeze
as a front porch swing and a rainy summer night

III. Paige Blackburn | Two Poems

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Stopping by the Valley on a Snowy Evening

The murders, here,
are as sure as the wallabies, the boa constrictors, the chemical rain,
the explosions, drug busts,
suicides, mine collapses and sinkholes, hospital closures, fast food arsonists, local celebrities,
local legends, local pedophiles…

IV. Gabriel & Marcel Piqueray | Four Prose Poems

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Professionals

Having scaled the wall, they leapt over the bristling shards of broken glass, hoping to land softly in the slop-pile left over from last year’s meager scrapings.

As they fell endlessly, they came to the conclusion that they must have picked the wrong wall. Growing used to the void, they started to think of other things.

V. Alistair Noon | The Phonographic Commission and two more poems

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The Phonographic Commission

Can I read or write? No sir. Speak loud and clearly?
Yes. Can I sing my homeland? I tell him the hills
I left when soldiers made me a soldier.
Cigar Man nods. His nib moves on
as a blackbird addresses the camp from a birch.

VI. Elaine Randell | ‘The heart is a repetitious dancer’: Three Uncollected Poems from Collected Poems & Prose

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On finding your copy of The Observers Book of Geology 1960

for Barry MacSweeney

Falling
open at Fools Gold
the stone that would create sparks when struck against.
Struck against, railed against but
it’s still tender, sore,
The heart in flames again seeing
Seeing your name on the frontispiece

VII. Kelvin Corcoran | Three Poems

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From Position-Zero

‘Pius-strokes from position-zero!’ John Berryman

It came back to me, burnt bodies
hanging in the bird-less trees
singing for their lives, the unnamed
ghosts of smoke in Dadia forest.

The list is endless, the loss endless,
we might learn something by listening.

VIII. Mark Scroggins | Zion Offramp

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Zion Offramp

We are offered a tour of the shiny
new Chabad Gaza, just at dusk,
sunset multiplied across the water’s
seasonably tranquil waves. Maps
have been redrawn left and right,
hatchets have been buried, sometimes
with less enthusiasm than hoped.

IX. Sally Connolly | excerpt

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“Hamlet and Mourning in David Melnick’s A Pin’s Fee”

David Melnick studied mathematics as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and focused his graduate studies in literature at UC Berkeley mainly on Shakespeare; his PhD dissertation was on Louis Zukofsky’s writings on Shakespeare. He worked from 1984 until 2000 as a copyeditor at the San Francisco Chronicle and died in the Bay Area on February 15, 2022. A Pin’s Fee is an extended elegiac sequence on his lover David Nelson Doyle’s illness and coming death.[1] The poem was published in 1988 and was his final work. Doyle died from AIDS related causes on July 28, 1992.[2] The title is taken from Act One, scene 4 of Hamlet, when the grieving prince is advised not to follow after his father’s ghost by Horatio, lest the sight drive him insane. Hamlet responds: “I do not set my life at a pin’s fee, / And for my soul, what can it do to that, / Being a thing immortal as itself?”[3] The poem is a profound meditation on preemptive grief, the breakdown of language in the face of inescapable loss, and the state of the human soul in the wake of epistemological schism. (read more)

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X. ALESSANDRO CORTELLO

reviews

Orfeo’s Last Act by Michelene Wandor.

Greenwich Exchange 2023 | £10.00 | 264pp.

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Unlike many novels with musical themes, Orfeo’s Last Act by Michelene Wandor is a book where music is not used as mere bait to attract superficial readers, nor treated as an interchangeable backdrop filled with inaccuracies that would make any professional cringe. The author herself is an expert musician and researcher, and her work on the sacred and secular compositions of Mantuan composer Salamone Rossi has been recorded on CD. Salamone is the central figure of this novel, whose uniqueness lies in its parallel development of two stories: one, featured on the odd-numbered pages, set in Mantua between the late 16th and early 17th centuries; the other, on the even-numbered pages, in early 2000s East Anglia. (read more)

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Fortnightly Serials

The Fortnightly Review was built in part on the publication of works in serial form, including Anthony Trollope’s three novels, The Belton Estate (1865–66), The Eustace Diamonds (1871–73), and Lady Anna (1871). Current serials include Anthony Howell’s epic-in-progress The Runiad and Alan Wall’s novel White Ivory.

latest from The Runiad
Anthony Howell

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See also our Special Issue: The Fortnightly Review Continues (Winter–Spring 2024)

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Poetry Editors: Robert Archambeau (US) and Peter Robinson (UK).

Managing editor: Paige Blackburn.

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E ditors, Contributors, and Contact Details.

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Editorial Statement.

The object of THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW is to become the organ of the unbiassed expression of many and various minds on topics of general interest in Politics, Literature, Philosophy, Science, and Art. Each contribution will have the gravity of an avowed responsibility. Each contributor, in giving his name, will not only give an earnest of his sincerity, but will claim the privilege of perfect freedom of opinion, unbiassed by the opinions of the Editor or of fellow contributors….We do not disguise from ourselves the difficulties of our task. Even with the best aid from contributors, we shall at first have to contend against the impatience of readers at the advocacy of opinions which they disapprove.

– Prospectus, G.H. Lewes, May 13, 1865. Emphasis added.

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Welcome to The Fortnightly Review. This is the New Series.