NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
Back in the 1940s, when the painter Philip Guston taught art classes at the University of Iowa, he would—so goes the story—come to class on the first day with one can of paint. He would set it on his desk in front of his students and tell them, “This! This is all you have. You may think you have ideas. You think you have images. But you’re not going to be a great painter until you realize that the only thing you have to paint is paint. Yet paint has a remarkable quality. You can mix it.” Something analogous can be said about writing, the oft-repeated anecdote about the painter Edgar Degas asking Stéphane Mallarmé why he couldn’t write poems. "Yours is a hellish craft,” he complained. “I can't manage to say what I want, and yet I'm full of ideas." “It’s not with ideas, my dear Degas,” responded Mallarmé, “that one makes verse. It’s with words.”
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, one of the first things they attempted to do is regulate the discourse. How could the populace get wary of a war, or weary of it, if there was no war for them to speak of? It didn’t matter how many soldiers lost their lives or orphanages were hit with bombs, how many towns were left in ruin and horrifying war crimes perpetrated, when this was certainly no war, merely a Special Military Operation, when the democratically elected Jewish president of Ukraine could be referred to as a neo-Nazi traitor to the Jewish people, the figurehead of a corrupt regime. Saying otherwise—using the word “war” instead of the phrase “Special Military Operation”—carries a sentence of up to fifteen years in prison. As far as the government of Russia was concerned, it is the words used that determine the reality. In her poem “Language Lesson 1976,” written on the occasion of America’s bicentennial, Heather McHugh declared, “The language is a game as well.”
This game is now being played with gusto in the American federal government. On one of his first days in office, the president of the United States, without elaboration, blamed an acronym, DEI, for the catastrophic collision of a helicopter with a passenger plane over DC. Immigrants are regularly equated with enemy combatants—an alien invasion to be dealt with through the 225-year-old Alien Enemies Act. It’s remarkable what a word like “alien” can do to instantly transform a family of refugees into soulless Martians from The War of the Worlds. The President has labeled Jewish Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a staunch supporter of Israel who has leveled occasional criticisms at the Netanyahu regime, a Palestinian, devaluing the common demonym for an ethnicity into a slur. “Schumer is a Palestinian, as far as I’m concerned,” Trump said in typical non-sequitur response to a media question about the U.S. corporate tax rate. “He’s become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore.”
On May 2nd of this year, alongside other journals, presses, and arts organizations, Bennington Review received a letter from the National Endowment for the Arts notifying us that our hard-won NEA grant was being withdrawn. The reason was that as a literary journal, we fell outside “projects that reflect the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.” The National Endowment of the Arts, whose stipulated mission as an independent federal agency has been to “foster the excellence, diversity, and vitality of the arts in the United States” was terminating all awards that fell outside of the President’s priorities, which apparently are:
“projects that elevate the Nation's HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities.”
My visceral reaction on first reading the NEA’s email mirrored the closing lines of Natalie Shapero’s new poem “Enough”: “I would give essentially / anything to once and forever just get all these words the fuck away from me.” And I thought of William Ward Butler’s opening lines in his poem “Keywords”: “If you make a promise you can’t keep / don’t call it a lie, call it a good faith violation.”
Clearly, all of the Endowment’s new official goals, maybe aside from fostering AI competency, are as laudable and necessary as the promotion of artistic excellence, diversity, and vitality—if they were actual goals and not a rhetorical game. We cannot express enough our gratitude to you, our generous and thoughtful readers, for quickly taking action and providing us with enough financial support to offset all of the funding the government’s memorandum had abruptly taken away, thus ensuring the continued health and stability of our little magazine.
If you are reading this note, you have opened up our fourteenth issue. In it, we sought through our selections to highlight and recognize poems, stories, and essays that, to quote the poet Izzy Casey, who has three startling pieces in these pages, “defy the horrible constraints that language imposes.” The artworks on the issue’s front and back are word drawings by Douglas Culhane, Senior Lecturer in Art and History of Art at Amherst College. We hope they cause you think about the words themselves, the strings of meaning they make when arranged together. Moth, mother, other, ether. Entire empire under ocean.
Michael Dumanis
North Bennington, Vermont
late Summer, 2025
