Letters & Chants

Response from Readers

“Letters & Chants” is an on-going feature in Chant de la Sirène, which offers our journal audiences the opportunity to respond in writing or the other arts to our recently published issues. Send your “chants” about a specific past issue at the email below, in a Word doc attachment:

chantdelasirenesubmissions@gmail.com

“On Tyranny” (Issue 5)

Editor’s Note: We are currently welcoming responses to our most recent issue, “On Tyranny—Poetics & Protest Art.”

“Fin d’Année”

Daily life also made it difficult to see the situation clearly. Life went on as before . . . I still phoned my girlfriend Charlie. We went to the cinema, had a meal in a small wine bar, drank Chianti, and went dancing together. I still saw my friends, had discussions with acquaintances. Family birthdays were celebrated as they had always been . . . .

Strangely enough, it was just this automatic continuation of ordinary life that hindered any lively, forceful reaction against the horrors.”

                                     — Sebastian Haffner, describing life in middle-class Berlin in March 1933

Our street feels quiet, though noise from Clinton Parkway got louder the last year or two—unmufflered cars and coal-rollin’ bros. At the end of the street sits an empty stone building that once served as a stop on the Underground Railroad (“John Brown slept here”). The rich Oklahoman college students reside in the refurbished house across the street where the Nazi used to live. The people on the corner never engage, don’t even leave their car to pick up the mail. B., at the other corner down the street, owned the company that did our bathrooms. Then there’s the family guy who comes home in a slicker with reflective tape. And the solitary dude who goes for a walk at the same time every day, no matter the season; has had a dead tree in his front yard for years.

M.R. left little boxes of peppermint bark at everyone’s door for Christmas (and yes, people around here are saying “Merry Christmas”); she knows everything that’s going on—I call her the “Mayor of Sagebrush Drive.” And she’s an election worker when we have elections. The next-door neighbors, alas, are Cubs fans—except maybe the harried mother. We go to work, do our jobs, come home, talk and avoid unpleasant topics. The houses are identical split-levels built during the first Nixon Administration. During COVID, this was my village.

Not as many fireworks New Year’s Eve as usual. We held our annual New Year’s Day open house for the neighbors, but only 11 people came this year. No precip in months, unlike California. I just prepared my yearly performance review file—a.k.a. the “suck-up letter.” Also tallied our expenses, which weren’t pretty (though we did give a few dollars to worthy causes). Everyone’s upset about the skyrocketing property tax assessments.

I finished re-reading The Descent of Allette. I doomscroll; but my 98-year-old lifelong-news-junkie dad won’t look at it anymore, ever since Russia invaded Ukraine: “I’ve seen this movie before.” It is important to spend time “in nature,” they say. The older I get, the more time I have to spend maintaining my body in a functional condition. It’s my job to do the shopping, keep the birdbath clean, and prepare young adults for a future they do not believe exists.

We spent last Saturday making mole sauce with our friend. Last week, I made chocolate chess pie. I also filled up my actual spare tire. I read the year-end plea from the activist groups (“only 24 hours left!”). I groomed. I strategized. I did what I was supposed to do.  

—Joe Harrington

***

“Climate & Poetics” (Issue 4)

Editor’s Note—We received only two “chants” about the “Climate & Poetics” issue published in Fall 2024. One is a Letter to the Editor from Linda Russo, which reflects upon the capitalist economics behind our current destructive climate-change global events, and those infrastructures that refuse to address these events. In the wake of the recent COP meeting in Brazil, in which high ambitions for fossil fuel planetary phase-outs agreements were not realized, Russo’s letter seems appropriately “right on”—although she sent it last year.

We also received a moving poetry video by multi-media artist Alexis Kraskilvsky, whose visual-verbal topic is the aftermath of one of the world’s most destructive cyclones, the Bhola Cyclone in Bangladesh in 1970. The story behind Kraskilvsy’s lyrics recalling this catastrophic cyclone reminds us that increasingly dangerous global weather is to come, unless we can roll-back the warming numbers. Climate change, as Kraskilvsky reminds us, has been and will be particularly devastating to both indigenous and impoverished countries like Bangladesh. We publish Kraskilvsky’s video thinking ahead to the next CDLS— Issue 6—which will return to the topic of climate with a special focus on “Oceans & Rivers.” More information on Issue 6 with a call for work will be available here winter 2026.

With appreciation to Jonathan Skinner for help with establishing our new journal feature, “Letters & Chants.”

To the Editor:

I found the readings and the issue (and visuals) on “Climate & Poetics” [Issue 4 of Chant de la Sirène all very thought provoking. When we agree to say "climate and poetics" we are giving ourselves a choice. The planet is warming. The destructive colonial capitalist machinery chugs on. If one is not throwing their disobedient body in its path or raising their voice in solidarity against the further entrenchment of its infrastructures, or creating and implementing plans for sharing abundance and protecting the sovereignty and wellbeing of others, one is not moving themselves or anyone toward a different future. One might understand the choice to be between grieving and dreaming. But having no real options, being in a situation that requires both griefs and dreams, one must interrogate the comfort they find in a familiar spatiotemporality that maintains that the past brings us to grief while toward the future we aim our dreaming. When we agree to say "climate and poetics" we are speaking of other possible futures. Not just one; not just one's. We have agreed to acknowledge the potentiality of all other futurities. One in a position of privilege may signal acknowledgement with a display of uncertainty as rich and troubling as any unanticipated, unwelcome performance. This is anticipated in the agreement to respond to "climate and poetics." Whether poems will or will not make a difference they may make differentness visible. They may pay attention, tend to something, see it through beyond the slender difference. 

—Linda Russo

***

—Alexis Krasilovsky, director, Cyclone Song (color video, 3:34 minutes)