An Origins Tale

Chant de la Sirène—Journal of Poetics & the Hybrid Arts

An Ancient History

Chant de la Sirène first began as a weblog in 2007 by Laura Hinton, on the topic of the hybrid literary arts in New York City. This “Blogger” format focused on the radical New York poetry experiment & its multi-media arts scene through which Hinton had been floating in and out of for many years. This blog published Hinton’s writings and interviews, as well as several guest writers, on the topic of hybridity in contemporary literature. It came to contain a wider array of poetry book reviews, artist-poet dialogues, poet tributes and memorials, conference travelogues, even occasional memoir essays.

Chant de la Sirène the Blog continued its presence on the world wide web until the spring of 2020, when—under duress from the Covid 19 pandemic—its Google domain was snatched from this digital environment by its own paid host. This massive U.S. company controlling the internet, which physically squats on an enormous “campus” on the shores of the San Francisco Bay mid-peninsula destroying parts of Hinton’s beloved marshy Baylands, refused to offer a simple mechanism to accept Hinton’s tiny payment for the annual domain subscription.

Lacking funding during the pandemic, the poor neglected blog site eventually passed out to sea, as if digital sewage from a bad yacht running on evil corporate winds. To make matters worse, Hinton’s original blog domain was grabbed up by domain snatchers, the pirates of the worldwide web. They purchase seemingly abandoned web sites for cheap in order to reap huge profits by forcing owners to pay high captive ransoms. Held hostage by GoDaddy, kind of like Odysseus under the spell of singing sirens, Hinton refused to pay those hundreds of dollars required by the GoDaddy hostage-takers.

So she took her sirens back. Out of Google’s catastrophic pandemic wreckage and lack of customer service call centers, a new domain was born—Chant de la Sirène, the Journal. Our Odysseus never ended up in Ithaca. But the sirens who plagued our Male Hero have been re-conceived into this journal. The blog is reborn as an internet magazine, viewed through French transliteration, and—through the art of bricolage—made into a more fulsome journal format. Five years later, five issues have been published, featuring work by some of the best contemporary poets writing in English, as well as art, photography, video and other forms of multimedia. A sixth issue is planned for 2026 on Oceans, Rivers, & Climate Poetics (revisiting the climate-change theme of CDLS Issue 4 (2024). Study group/writing workshops as well as international launch readings via Zoom have become part of CDLS multimedia events.

While each issue is compiled around a special social / political theme, the writers and multimedia artists published in Chant de la Sirène are selected for creative work that follows their own siren-inspired mis/directions and outlier currents. We publish that which pushes the boundaries of poetry, media and art. As a goddess of enchantment and a sort of deviance in a traditional patriarchal and logocentric world, Circe—whose Italian coastal homeland we recently revisited and sailed upon—tells Odysseus, her lost wayfarer lover:

When your crew have taken you past these Sirens,

I cannot give you coherent directions as to which

of two courses you are to take...

Publishing History & Calls for Work

Chant de la Sirène is published once a year but with no set schedule. We now celebrate our fifth year and fifth journal issue, and anticipate our sixth! We call for work during winter or spring months for each themed issue. We do not read unsolicited manuscripts, only those sent per announced theme-based using our submissions email during periods when our “Call for New Work” page is up. (We do not use Submittable at this time and there are no charges for submission.) Our issues are free to all audiences who have a search engine. The submissions email is:

chantdelasirenesubmissions@gmail.com

Again, we do not solicit or take submissions except during our “call” period. Using this email address, you may also praise or chant or rant against our journal. We now publish a feature called “Letters & Chants” for this purpose (see Menu). We do love to hear from our readers and audiences.

You can also now make a donation to help support the sirens in providing future issues & our reading-performance events. See our Support the Journal page.

Please be generous with email response time, as certain times of year, the sirens will be out at sea—making trouble, surely, and providing mis/direction for other seafarers seeking an easy passage.

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Top photograph, Laura Hinton: An ancient Roman fresco in the National Roman Museum of the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome (first seen by the Editor and photographed in December 2019)--a representation of our staff members aboard this nearly sinking boat, fishing for work.

Note that that previous posts from Chant de la Sirène the Blog were not entirely lost at sea, thanks to heroic internet archivists who refused to listen to perverse corporate logic. Oldies from the original CDLS Blog are available by clicking on the Chant de la Sirène Blog Selected Archives link below (see yellow footer strip).

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