Welcome to THE HOWL, Mother Tongue

Welcome to my blog, offspring of Banned Poetry, a zine I created to celebrate alternative and innovative poetry.This is a new format for sharing my latest poetry, prose and art, and the work of poets and artists who inspire me to create and expand. I am presently interested in producing works to acknowledge the potential of language to access deeper states of mind, to re-frame experience, to explore the boundaries between genres and poetic form while holding to the creative poetic species as a measure and gauge.

My poetry is born out of my love affair with words and my passion for charged play and exploration of the hidden, the mystery at work beneath our consciousness. My poetry has grown out of a sense of social outrage, an immense love of this creature world, wild nature, and out of my own journey through madness and grace. It has grown out of a precious relationship with love and death and hope. If my work has a calling it is to give form and character to the unseen and unheard, the shadows, the untouchables, the unredeemed, and of stretching the boundaries between madness and sanity, between the banal and the mystical in an attempt to restore our quaking humanity.

Anatomy of a Painting

they gather behind time, wayward, defiant crowds, indistinct, clamouring—the obliterated, unheard, a lost world still trying to happen. a thought or memory falls across your path, you stop, seized by some errant ghost, a flicker of an eyelid, a glance. a quickening shadow touches down, settles for a second, an instant, an age, lifetimes, a thought-murmur transgressing time thrusts its way forward, upwards, trying to collect the disremembered of centuries, still trying to invent a way into the world.

you succumb, set out the paper and charcoal, canvas, paint brushes, turpentine, the ritual life bringing forth an unlived world, a fleeting moment gathered in, saved, a thought-form, unspoken, given a face, a place to touch down; the banned, the silenced, the banished—exiles finding a home.

Paulette C Turcotte January 31, 2023