Finding Lost Voices: Finding Lola Ridge on the Lower East Side with Terese Svoboda
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
I hate to leave this beautiful place, is the phrase that kept washing through my mind as I packed up my files and left Edna St. Vincent Millay’s home in Austerlitz, NY to return, via New York City, home. That phrase is the name of a memoir by Howard Norman about his connection with Point Reyes National Sea Shore; a place he went to seek inspiration when he wrote. I felt the same connection and a sense of completion leaving Steepletop, yesterday. I'd done what I’d set out to do. I finished my copy edits. Driving down the tree-line Taconic Parkway toward New York City, the reality of my book began to settle in. In just one month, my biography about Sanora Babb will be available for pre-order! (Don’t worry, you’ll hear more about this soon!)
In New York City, my friend, the author Terese Svoboda was gracious enough to host me at her apartment on the Lower East Side. Svoboda wrote an incredible, comprehensive biography about the poet, Lola Ridge (1873-1941), called Anything that Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet that I highly recommend (in fact, if you sign up for a paid subscription this week, I’ll send you a free copy of the book).
Svoboda lives in the same neighborhood where Lola Ridge once lived. The same neighborhood about which Ridge wrote in her famous collection: The Ghetto and Other Poems (1918). As Svoboda would write in her biography “Ridge was one of the first poets to delineate the poor in Manhattan and in particular women’s lives in New York City” (4). The Ghetto and Other Poems is a book that portrays immigrants as humans during an era when they were thought as anything but. Her book not only documented their struggles and illuminated their hopes and dreams.
This morning, Svoboda took me on a walking tour where she brought the neighborhood and its past incarnations back to life. One such building was the Forward Building, a building she mentioned that Ridge had written about.
As I sit in my little fifth-floor room—
Bare,
Save for bed and chair,
And coppery stains
Left by seeping rains
On the low ceiling
And green plaster walls,
Where when night falls
Golden lady-bugs
Come out of their holes,
And roaches, sepia-brown, consort…
I hear bells pealing
Out of the gray church at Rutgers street,
Holding its high-flung cross above the Ghetto,
And, one floor down across the court,
The parrot screaming:
Vorwärts… Vorwärts…
The parrot frowsy-white,
Everlastingly swinging
On its iron bar.
A little old woman,
With a wig of smooth black hair
Gummed about her shrunken brows,
Comes sometimes on the fire escape.
An old stooped mother,
The left shoulder low
With that uneven droopiness that women know
Who have suckled many young…
Yet I have seen no other than the parrot there.
I watch her mornings as she shakes her rugs
Feebly, with futile reach
And fingers without clutch.
Her thews are slack
And curved the ruined back
And flesh empurpled like old meat,
Yet each conspires
To feed those guttering fires
With which her eyes are quick.
On Friday nights
Her candles signal
Infinite fine rays
To other windows,
Coupling other lights,
Linking the tenements
Like an endless prayer.
She seems less lonely than the bird
That day by day about the dismal house
Screams out his frenzied word…
That night by night—
If a dog yelps
Or a cat yawls
Or a sick child whines,
Or a door screaks on its hinges,
Or a man and woman fight—
Sends his cry above the huddled roofs:
Vorwärts… Vorwärts…
—from The Ghetto
The parrot in this section of the poem is screaming Vorwärts —the Yiddish word for "Forward"— which is also the name of the most popular radical newspaper in Europe whose headquarters were located in the same neighborhood where Ridge lived. This morning when we walked past the beatifully restored building Svoboda resuscitated its story for me.
After our walk, I sat down with Svoboda to ask her about how she’d come to choose Ridge as the subject for a biography. She told me that she first fell in love with Ridge when she saw an article about her by Robert Pinsky in Slate. As she remembers, “it was love at first sight.” Svoboda felt immediately compelled to bring back the story of Ridge’s life. Then, when she realized that Ridge had lived in the neighborhood where she lived, she knew she would have to write about her.
According to Svoboda, Ridge was a radical poet, as she writes in her biography, “Ridge advocated individual liberty. She supported not only the rights of women, but laborers, Blacks, Jews, immigrants and homosexuals.” She was someone who lived her life completely dedicated to her writing life. When Ridge was asked by an English critic, “What is the proper subject for poetry?” She answered, “Anything that burns you.”
Ridge was born in Ireland, then emigrated to New Zealand where she married a Gold Miner, had a child, and then left with her mother and child in tow to study Art in Australia. In 1907, she took a new name and boarded a ship for America. It was a complicated time to be a woman writer and she made the impossible decision to leave her son at an orphanage in Los Angeles before continuing on to New York. In 1908, she would settle in the Lower East Side and find inspiration for her booklength poem The Ghetto.
While in New York, Ridge became an anarchist. She worked for the revolutionary, Emma Goldman, and taught at the Modern School at the Ferrer Center. It was after she quit working at the Modern School that she left New York and that she began to write about it in The Ghetto, a book that Louis Untermeyer would call, “the hit of the year.” A book that would bring Ridge fame during her lifetime. Upon return to New York, Ridge would host salons that were attended by the literary elite like William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, and up and coming writers like Hart Crane (who, according to Svoboda found inspiration for his poetry in Ridge’s own.)
BROOKLYN BRIDGE
Pythoness body—arching
Over the night like an ecstasy—
I feel your coils tightening…
And the world's lessening breath.
—from The Ghetto
Ten years before Virginia Woolf published her essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” Ridge gave a speech in Chicago entitled, “Woman and the Creative Will,” about how gender roles stifled and often blocked the creative lives of women. As she wrote,
”woman is not and never has been naturally inferior.”
But, these days, we know little about Ridge’s life. Why did such a valued poet of her day fade away from public knowledge? According to Svoboda, a lot of her disappearance from the cannon has to do with timing. Ridge died in 1941, at a time when WWII loomed on the horizon and conservatism and patriotism were rising in the national consciousness. It’s a shame, because Ridge was writing during a time much like our own when the country was divided, when the disparity between the rich and the poor was widening. But, thanks to the archival work done by Svoboda, we can now better understand this important literary figure. I hope you’ll check out both the poems of Lola Ridge and Svoboda’s biography.
❤️🙏🌟