Remembering Revolutionary Modernist Poet Lola Ridge ( 12 December, 1873 – 19 May, 1941 )

Irish American. revolutionary working class poet Lola Ridge was born Rose Emily Ridge on December. 12, 1873, in Dublin, Ireland. Her medical student father died when she was three, so her mother emigrated to Australia, before moving on to Aotearoa/New Zealand when Lola was 13. Her mother remarried in 1880 to a Scottish miner and the family lived in a three-roomed shack on the Hokitikagold fields, among Maori and European and Chinese immigrants.

At 22, Ridge married a gold-mine manager in Kanieri, Hokitika. Their first son, born in 1896, died of bronchitis in infancy; their second, Keith, was born in 1900. In 1901 and 1902, under the name 'Lola’, she published her first poems, ‘A Deserted Diggings, Maoriland’ and ‘Driving the Cattle Home’ in Bulletin and Otago Witness. This was a crossroads moment, when she decided to break with social convention to become an artist.

In 1903, she left her husband and took her son to her mother in Sydney, where she studied art at the Académie Julienne and wrote her first book, Verses. In 1907, her mother and stepfather both died, and she left for San Francisco at the age of 34.

After making a name for herself there, she moved on to New York City’s Greenwich Village,in 1908 after she left her son in an orphanage.The move to New York saw the birth of Lola Ridge, modernist poet, utopian anarchist and labour activist, claiming to be ten years younger than she was. To support herself, she worked as an illustrator, factory worker, poet, and model.

She quickly became the center of the thriving radical scene and the modernist literary movement, contributing to and editing a number of “little” magazines. She was heavily involved in various leftist causes, and her radical politics were easily discernible in both her actions and her words. 

In New York by 1908, she became Emma Goldman's confidante. By then Ridge had become the chief organizer of anarchists at the Ferrer Center in Manhattan, a task which honed her progressive New Zealand radicalism into a love of Kropotkin-style anarchy. She heard passionate speeches by the most prominent free-thinkers and immigrants in the country and organized classes in everything from Esperanto to music appreciation. When describing.what America had to offer the immigrant, Ridge wrote: “On my board are bitter apples/And honey served on thorns.” She felt very deeply about the stinting of its promised freedom."

In 1916 she supported the cause of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, convicted (and much later pardoned) after having been framed as "usual suspects" for the Preparedness Day Bombing; and she was arrested in the 1920s for protesting against the execution of  Sacco and Vanzetti  (Italian anarchists who were charged with a bank robbery in which two guards were killed, convicted in a ludicrous trial and sentenced to death. A worldwide campaign and a full confession by the real robber failed to prevent this sentence being carried out. who didn't get a fair deal from a highly prejudiced court at a time of terrorism hysteria - one critic compared  the chances of an Italian getting a fair trial in Boston to a black person getting one in the American South).In 1916 she supported the cause of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, convicted (and much later pardoned)  outside the Massachusetts State House, after facing down a rearing police horse

She published poems in Emma Goldman’s radical journal Mother Earth and in The New Republic. Some of these poems were collected in The Ghetto and Other Poems (1918), a vivid collection of works evoking the brutal life of the working classes of New York City.The title poem celebrates the Jewish immigrants of the Lower East Side. 

Rooted in early 20th-century New York City, The Ghetto and other Poems anticipates much of what was to emerge amongst the “objectivists,” apparent in Ridge’s focus on the working poor and their intrinsic role in the composition and machinations of the city. Everywhere the city, its people, and their conditions are conjoined, as in “Faces” where “A late snow beats/ with cold white fists upon the tenements.” The conditions and exploitation of the working poor engaged with in this book carry an intense consciousness of the ongoing Great War and its implications, a tone that tempers every atmosphere in the collection :

Ridge soon began publishing poems in other journals, including the Dial, Poetry, and the Literary Digest. She became involved in a circle of poets that included William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Waldo Frank, and she worked as associate editor of the journal Others.

Ridge was an anarchist concerned with the larger political picture but concerned as well with intimate life. Well ahead of her time, she supported the rights of women, laborers, blacks, Jews, immigrants, and homosexuals (she identified and was identified as bisexual). She advocated individual liberty as well as social justice. 

A year after the publication of The Ghetto and Other Poems, Ridge gave a speech in Chicago  entitled “Women and the Creative Will,” in which she argued that sexually constructed gender roles hindered female identity development. This was at least a decade before such ideas were popular, even among women’s rights advocates, making her a model for us today as we struggle in a world beset by ever more sophisticated versions of the sexist, racist, heterosexist, and xenophobic threats that face each new generation.

Ridge worked on an expanded version of her speech for years until Viking, her publisher, told her it wouldn’t sell. The title poem of her second book, Sun-up and Other Poems, which was a huge success is told in the voice of a bad girl who beats her doll, bites her nurse, wonders “if God has spoiled Jimmy” after he exposes himself, and intimates that her imaginary friend is her bisexual half.

She modelled a practice of engagement in her personal life by actively participating in rallies and protests against injustice with ferocious spirit, and living in poverty in solidarity with the poor, giving her work an authenticity worth investigating. Solo and broke in the next decade, she traveled to Baghdad and Mexico – and took a lover at sixty-one. Her five books of poetry contain poems about lynching, execution, race riots, and imprisonment. Her writing is vigorous and electric, and of great power and intensity.,

“Anything that burns you” was the advice she gave English critic Alice Hunt Bartlett when she asked what poets should be writing in 1925. “I write about something that I feel intensely. How can you help writing about something you feel intensely?”

Always an active social protester, Ridge participated in protests, marches, and pickets with ferocious spirit.She was very committed in her beliefs, leading a life of poverty even though she didn’t have to. Her writing is vigorous and electric, her Red Flag (1927) was a collection of poems celebrating the Russian Revolution. Ridge’s strongly emotional, almost mystical work became somewhat out of fashion as radical social realism gave way to modernist avant-garde in the art world.

Her later collections included Firehead (1930) a long poetic allegory on the execution of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, and Dance of Fire (1935), the latter written after her trip to Mexico on a Guggenheim Fellowship.Her reputation as a poet developed, and she was twice awarded the Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry (1935, 1936) and was awarded a Guggenheim Poetry Fellowship (1935).

Throughout her life, Ridge grappled with a variety of ills, ranging from an eating disorder and moments of severe economic insecurity, to the threat of political repression during the 1919 – 1920 Palmer raids on leftists and anarchists, and what may have been a nervous breakdown. She weathered them all,until she died in Brooklyn, NYC,  of pulmonary tuberculosis on March 19th 1941 aged 67. Shortly before her death she wrote, “Nice is the one adjective in the world that is laughable applied to any single thing I have ever written.”

The New York Times declared her “one of America’s best poets” when she died, and in their obituary describe her as “one of the leading contemporary poets” who “found in the meeting of many races in America the hope of a new world " but her interest in radicalism, feminism, and experimental poetry wrote her out of literary history,possibly in part due to the inhospitality of mid-twentieth century America towards socialists and communists,. but she remains a trailblazer for women, poetry, and human rights who was far ahead of her time.

Few today may have heard of Ridge, but her impact on America society cannot be denied, a poet whose work brought real, tangible change. Ridge’s poem about Sacco and Vanzetti, for instance, was duplicated by the thousands, passed hand-to-hand among activists, and would help free the labor activist Tom Mooney from unjust incarceration.and she remains significant for the courage with which she addressed social issues in her writing and for her pivotal position among the modernist and women writers of twentieth-century America. I would strongly recommend the book  Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, by Terese Svoboda, Schaffner Press, 2016. for a further insight into this revolutionary poet's life.

Dream - Lola Ridge

 

I have a dream
to fill the golden sheath
of a remembered day….
(Air
heavy and massed and blue
as the vapor of opium…
domes
fired in sulphurous mist…
sea
quiescent as a gray seal…
and the emerging sun
spurting up gold
over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay….)
But the day is an up-turned cup
and its sun a junk of red iron
guttering in sluggish-green water –
where shall I pour my dream?

 

Freedom- Lola Ridge

Let men be free!
All violence is but the agony
Of caged things fighting blindly for the right
To be and breathe and burn their little hour.
Bare spirits—not debight
In smooth-set garments of philosophy;
But near earth forces, elemental, crude,
Scarce knowing their invicible, rude power;
Within the close of their primeval servitude
Half comatose.

Who, ravening for their depleted dower
Of so much sun and air and warmth and food,
And the same right to procreate and love
As the beasts have and the birds,
Strike wild—not having words
To parry with—at the cold force above.

Let men be free!
Hate is the price
Of servitude, paid covertly; and vice
But the unclean recoil of tortured flesh
Whipped through the centuries within a mesh
Spun out of priestly art.
Oh men, arise, be free!—Who breaks one bar
Of tyranny in this so bitter star
Has cleansed its bitterness in part. 

To the Others - Lola Ridge

I see you, refulgent ones,
Burning so steadily
Like big white arc lights…
There are so many of you.
I like to watch you weaving—
Altogether and with precision
Each his ray—
Your tracery of light,
Making a shining way about America.

I note your infinite reactions—
In glassware
And sequin
And puddles
And bits of jet—
And here and there a diamond…

But you do not yet see me,
Who am a torch blown along the wind,
Flickering to a spark
But never out.

Secrets-  Lola Ridge

Secrets

infesting my half-sleep…

did you enter my wound from another wound

brushing mine in a crowd…

or did I snare you on my sharper edges

as a bird flying through cobwebbed trees at sun-up

carries off spiders on its wings?

 

Secrets,

running over my soul without sound,

only when dawn comes tip-toeing

ushered by a suave wind,

and dreams disintegrate

like breath shapes in frosty air,

I shall overhear you, bare-foot,

scatting off into the darkness….

I shall know you, secrets

by the litter you have left

and by your bloody foot-prints.

Submerged - Lola Ridge

I have known only my own shallows—
Safe, plumbed places,
Where I was wont to preen myself.

But for the abyss
I wanted a plank beneath
And horizons...

I was afraid of the silence
And the slipping toe-hold...

Oh, could I now dive
Into the unexplored deeps of me—
Delve and bring up and give
All that is submerged, encased, unfolded,
That is yet the best.

Reveille -  Lola Ridge 

Come forth, you workers! 

Let the fires go cold— 

Let the iron spill out, out of the troughs— 

Let the iron run wild Like a red bramble on the floors—

Leave the mill and the foundry and the mine  

And the shrapnel lying on the wharves— 

Leave the desk and the shuttle and the loom—

Come, 

With your ashen lives, 

Your lives like dust in your hands.  

I call upon you, workers. 

It is not yet light 

But I beat upon your doors. 

You say you await the Dawn 

But I say you are the Dawn. 

Come, in your irresistible unspent force  

And make new light upon the mountains.  

You have turned deaf ears to others— 

Me you shall hear.  

Out of the mouths of turbines, 

Out of the turgid throats of engines, 

Over the whisling steam,  

You shall hear me shrilly piping.  

Your mills I shall enter like the wind,  

And blow upon your hearts, 

Kindling the slow fire.  

They think they have tamed you, workers— 

Beaten you to a tool 

To scoop up a hot honor 

Till it be cool— 

But out of the passion of the red frontiers 

A great flower trembles and burns and glows 

And each of its petals is a people.   

Come forth, you workers— 

Clinging to your stable 

And your wisp of warm straw— 

Let the fires grow cold, 

Let the iron spill out of the troughs, 

Let the iron run wild 

Like a red bramble on the floors . . .  

As our forefathers stood on the prairies  

So let us stand in a ring, 

Let us tear up their prisons like grass 

And beat them to barricades— 

Let us meet the fire of their guns 

With a greater fire, 

Till the birds shall fly to the mountains

For one safe bough. 

Mother-   Lola Ridge

Your love was like moonlight

turning harsh things to beauty, 

so that little wry souls reflecting 

each other obliquely as in cracked mirrors… 

beheld in your luminous spirit

their own reflection,

transfigured as in a shining stream, 

and loved you for what they are not.  

You are less an image in my mind 

than a luster 

I see you in gleams

pale as star-light on a gray wall… 

evanescent as the reflection of a white swan 

shimmering in broken water.