Fool’s Gold, April Fool’s Day Erasure Poem by Alexandra Carr-Malcolm

FOOL’S GOLD
by Alexandra Carr-Malcolm

Let the tree grow,
quivering green pavilions.
I take of my shoes,
let the Russian Empress’s veil flow,
the Imperial crown blaze out.
I am fearless!
This tree blows,
vanishing leaves fallen,
I wander down and pick flowers,
the moonlight—
wild roses, I will clasp
in my hands, and
lay them by
the river’s trembling edge.

SOURCE: “Fool’s Gold” by Alexandra Carr-Malcolm is based on page 41 of The Waves by Virginia Woolf (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alexandra Carr-Malcolm was born and raised in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, United Kingdom, and now lives in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, where she works as a freelance British Sign Language Interpreter. A writer since childhood, two years ago she established a poetry blog at worldlywinds.com. Her poetry has been published by Dagda Publishing in five collaborative anthologies, with part of the proceeds donated to charity.

Virginia Woolf’s Writing Room

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” VIRGINIA WOOLF

Adapted from theguardian.com: Novelist/essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and husband Leonard bought their house in Sussex, U.K.,  in 1919. Two years later, Woolf had a small writing room in the garden constructed out of a wooden toolshed below a loft. She wrote there in the summers, and liked it very much, though it was not ideal for concentration. She was always being distracted — by Leonard sorting the apples over her head in the loft, or the church bells at the bottom of the garden, or the noise of the children in the school next door, or the dog sitting next to her and scratching itself and leaving paw marks on her manuscript pages. In winter, it was often so cold and damp that she couldn’t hold her pen and had to retreat indoors. She wrote there with a board on her lap. In this writer’s lodge, Woolf wrote parts of all her major novels from Mrs Dalloway to Between the Acts, many essays and reviews, and many letters. 

Erasure Poem of the Day, courtesy of Wave Books and Virginia Woolf

I visited the wonderful Wave Books site today and made attempt at an erasure poem — thanks to the site’s easy-to-use erasure poetry software. Try it yourself at erasures.wavepoetry.com. Today’s text came from The Voyage Out, a novel by Virginia Woolf. Find the source material for my erasure poem here.

HERE’S THE ERASURE POEM, “The Dance”:

Happy Birthday, Joan Jobe Smith

HOW YOU TASTE THE APPLES

by Joan Jobe Smith

The winter of Yolo County Fair’s 1989
First Prize for Apple Pies showed me
how to keep my pie flute golden while
it baked by simply making an aluminum
foil collar for the pie pan like you might
for the TIn Man’s whiplashed neck.
While she showed me how to weave
a lattice top for my cherry pie she
told me her apple pie won because of
the Gravensteins, those large, yellow
red-striped apples she drove 40 miles
to Sebastopol to buy that are only ripe
two weeks in July, the same time her
husband’s parents came from Pittsburgh
to discuss her bad marriage getting worse.
While her husband and his parents
drank Wild Turkey in the living room
in her kitchen she rolled our the pie crust
dough made of lard and butter for a nutty
flavor and then she arranged inside the pie
the Gravenstein slices, apple halfmoons
halfmoons, a perfect swirl ad infinitum so that
when the apples baked down in their juice
the top crust would not go hard and fill
with stale air and many bourbon highballs
later, after her husband’d told His Side of
the story, his parents came to the decision
that their son’s obligations to his baby and wife
should not interfere with his personal happiness
or life and the last place her husband took her
before he went away was to the Yolo County
Fair and when she saw her First Place blue
ribbon, she covered her face to hide her tears,
asked him to leave her alone with her pie for
awhile so he carried their baby away to see
the clown. The main reason, though, she told me
she won was simply because those Gravenstein
apples are the perfect sweet-tartness for pies.
You don’t have to add lemon or cinnamon
or sugar or any other spice. That way
all you taste are the apples.

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A happy birthday and a huge slab of apple pie à la mode to Joan Jobe Smith, author of the recent Silver Birch Press release Charles Bukowski Epic Glottis: His Art, His Women (& me), available at Amazon.com. Joan shares her January 25th birthday with writing legends Virginia Woolf, Robert Burns, and W. Somerset Maugham. 

###

“How You Taste the Apples” by Joan Jobe Smith won the 1996 Mary Scheirman Award for poetry.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joan Jobe Smith, founding editor of PEARL and Bukowski    Review, worked for seven years as a go-go dancer before receiving her BA from CSULB and MFA from University of California, Irvine. A Pushcart Honoree, her award-winning work has appeared internationally in more than five hundred publications, including Outlaw Bible, Ambit, Beat Scene, Wormwood Review, and Nerve Cowboy—and she has published twenty collections, including Jehovah Jukebox (Event Horizon Press, US) and The Pow Wow Cafe (The Poetry Business, UK), a finalist for the UK 1999 Forward Prize. In July 2012, with her husband, poet Fred Voss, she did her sixth reading tour of England (debuting at the 1991 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival), featured at the Humber Mouth Literature Festival in Hull. In November 2012, Silver Birch Press published her literary profile entitled Charles Bukowski Epic Glottis: His Art & His Women (& me). In 2013, World Parade Books will release her memoir Tales of an Ancient Go-Go Girl. Her literary magazine PEARL will release its 50^th edition in 2013—find out more at pearlmag.com.

Beyond Creative Bubbles

…the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly at the beginning of a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.” VIRGINIA WOOLF

Yes, Virginia, the only way to reach the end is to keep slogging away — despite the doubts, distress, and sometimes downright disgust with the daily grind of it all.

Photo: TheBrockenInaglory