Paula Turcotte loves your dog, her dog, and Raisin Bran. She is the author of the chapbook Permutations (Baseline Press, 2024). Her work has been published in Canthius, PRISM international, Arc Poetry, and elsewhere, and she was the 2023 People’s Choice winner in CV2’s 2-Day Poetry Contest. Paula is a poetry editor at MAYDAY. She lives in Moh’kins’stis (Calgary).
You can read Desire, at last, a remembered landscape in the July2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
I actually first wrote this poem ten years ago, after the hundred-year floods in Calgary and southern Alberta. I’ve been tinkering with the poem ever since, as it never quite felt right. I know now that I needed more distance from the events of that summer to understand why I was so fixated on them. And when I think about that time now, it feels like I’m watching that version of myself on a film reel, which is what I hoped to convey in this poem.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
In its earlier iterations, this poem was much more linearly narrative, and eventually I realized it wasn’t working for me for the reasons stated above. It also had a different title and its epigraph was the Charles Wright line – “Desire, at last, a remembered landscape, and never the same hurt twice.” I came back to this line over and over, and eventually it worked its way into the poem as the golden shovel stanzas emerged. Even though I ended up cutting the second half of it, I think its ghost lives in the girl in the poem.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
I’ve faithfully returned to the poem Peanut Butter by Eileen Myles since I first read it more than a decade ago (somewhat ironically, I guess, as I’m allergic to peanuts). I love its images, its form, its unabashed joy. I find something new every time I read it. And I chose its final lines for the epigraph of my new chapbook: “I / squint. I / wink. I / take the / ride.”
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
Photography, maybe. I recently acquired a film camera and it’s been really interesting to notice how my thoughts shift to consider the world in vignette – feels similar to the process of writing a poem. (Why Pinhole Poetry is so captivating, perhaps?!)
What are you working on now?
I’m finishing up my first full poetry manuscript, which is also my Master’s thesis. I’ve spent a lot of intensive and purposeful time this year working on it, and I’m very proud of the poems! It’s been terrifically fun to print it all out and edit: I mostly write on the computer, but there’s something primal about seeing my work in a new way and physically marking it up.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
For me, a poem almost always begins from a scrap. My journal is filled with the most random phrases and words that I hear or see or conceive of and think, that could be a poem.
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
I took a class with Rita Dove in 2013, and she taught me to really notice things. which seems a bit trite to say, but I don’t know that I was in the habit of noticing a lot in my early adulthood. I think it’s an essential poetic muscle that needs to be exercised like any other. Look at this flower. Look at that bird. Look at the way that trash can is overflowing. Poetry for me doesn’t happen if I’m too wrapped up in my internal world, so I like to practice stepping outside myself in this way.