Pascale Potvin : part five

What are you working on?

A batch of poems that would get me in trouble if I published them.

Pascale Potvin : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I think that to read prose is to get drunk, whereas poetry’s like snorting a line. (Get it? A line? But, really, though.)

Pascale Potvin : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Too often, I’ll put together a little collection of words, feel a stop, then send it off somewhere only to add to it, the next day. I’m learning to wait for the sense that my poem couldn’t possibly sustain any more pressure without breaking. Stop signs and red lights, they’re just temporary; a reader needs a car crash.

Pascale Potvin : part two

How important is music to your poetry?

Totally. I only really got into writing poetry this year, when I revisited some groupings of words I’ve jotted down over the years. I’m not a musician, but they felt like lyrics at the time since they had distinct melodies to me. It’s in early quarantine that I decided to cut them down to their rawest forms; they still have their melodies, although not as rhyming. 

It’s for that reason I don’t really consider myself a poet, still today. I’ve always just tried to put words together in new ways, to hone distinct impulses.

Pascale Potvin : part one

Pascale Potvin is Prose Editor for Walled Women Magazine and The Augment Review, Assistant Editor for CHEAP POP, and Assistant at One Lit Place. She’s placed her own work in Eclectica Magazine, Maudlin House, Quail Bell Magazine, BlazeVOX, and many others. She has a BAH from Queen’s University, and she is working on a budding book series. You can read more about her at pascalepotvin.com or @pascalepalaces on Twitter.

Photo credit: Robert Charlebois

How does a poem begin?

It’s like—not a heart attack, that’s too extreme—but it’s like a shiver, a condensed emotion that appears first on my skin then my page, almost involuntarily. And I’ve come to realize that some of my life experiences have been less-than-typical, so in the end I find power by reshaping them that way.