Lola Ridge

After living for some time in New York, Ridge gained considerable notice with her long poem, The Ghetto, first published in 1918 in The New Republic. It was included in her first book, The Ghetto and Other Poems, published that year. The title poem portrays the Jewish immigrant community of Hester Street in the Lower East Side of New York. It explores the effects of capitalism, gender and generational conflict in ways that bear comparison to the works of Charles Reznikoff. But she also expressed the individuality of numerous immigrants, to show they were as various as other Americans and shared many human qualities.[1] The book was a critical success.

This recognition led to opportunities for Ridge; she became involved with and edited new avant-garde magazines such as Others in 1919, and Broom, founded in 1921 by Harold Loeb, for which she was the American editor from 1922–1923, while he published in Rome. While working with Loeb, she had an apartment next to the basement office of Broom in the townhouse of his estranged wife Marjorie Content.[4]

Ridge published 61 poems from 1908 to 1937 in such leading magazines as Poetry, New Republic, and The Saturday Review of Literature.[1] She was a contributing editor to The New Masses.[4]

She wrote and published four more books of poetry through 1935, and single poems into 1937. Her work was also collected in anthologies. Her third book, Red Flag (1927) collected much of her political poetry.[1]

In 1929, Ridge was accepted for a residency at the writers colony of Yaddo. That year she published Firehead, a long poem that was a radical retelling of Jesus' crucifixion. It and her last book, published in 1935 were more philosophical compared to her earlier work.[1]

She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935. She received the Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America for the years 1934 and 1935. Publishing until 1937, she died in 1941 of pulmonary tuberculosis.[4]

Ridge did not join any political party, but was active in radical causes. She protested against the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, and was among those arrested that day. In the 1930s, she supported the defence of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, who had been framed for a 1916 bombing at the Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco.

Her actions during the demonstration in front of the prison on the day Sacco and Vanzetti were executed were described by Katherine Anne Porter in her long essay, "The Never Ending Wrong." She wrote, "One tall, thin figure of a woman stepped out alone, a good distance into the empty square, and when the police came down at her and the horse's hoofs beat over her head, she did not move, but stood with her shoulders slightly bowed, entirely still. The charge was repeated again and again, but she was not to be driven away. A man near me said in horror, suddenly recognizing her, 'That's Lola Ridge!' and dashed into the empty space toward her. Without any words or a moment's pause, he simply seized her by the shoulders and walked her in front of him back to the edge of the crowd, where she stood as if she were half-conscious. I came near her and said, 'Oh no, don't let them hurt you! They've done enough damage already.' And she said, 'This is the beginning of the end - we have lost something we shan't find again.' I remember her bitter hot breath and her deathlike face."

My doll Janie has no waist

and her body is like a tub with feet on it.

Sometimes I beat her

but I always kiss her afterwards.

When I have kissed all the paint off her body

I shall tie a ribbon about it

so she shan't look shabby.

But it must be blue –

it mustn't be pink –

pink shows the dirt on her face

that won't wash off.

I beat Janie

and beat her...

but still she smiled...

so I scratched her between the eyes with a pin.

Now she doesn't love me any more...

she scowls... and scowls...

though I've begged her to forgive me

and poured sugar in the hole at the back of her head.

-- from Sun-Up and Other Poems

• The Ghetto, and Other Poems, Huebsch, 1918.
• Sun-Up, and Other Poems, Huebsch, 1920
• Red Flag, Viking, 1927.
• Firehead, Payson & Clarke, 1929.
• Dance of Fire, Smith & Haas, 1935.
• Daniel Tobin, ed. (2007). Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems. Quale Press. ISBN 978-0-9792999-1-9.
• Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge (ed. Daniel Tobin) Little Island Press, 2018.

• 1935 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry
• 1934 and 1935, Ridge won the Shelley Memorial Award, given by the Poetry Society of America
• Her papers are held at Smith College.[5]

With renewed scholarly interest in her work since the late 20th century, a selection of her first three books of poetry was published posthumously as Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems (2007), edited and with an introduction by Daniel Tobin. He notes that she is "part of the confluence of politics, culture and the burgeoning of women's voices at the advent of modernism to the start of World War II."[6]

Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the United States, wrote that contemporary readers needed "to appreciate the magnitude and freshness of her enterprise: to make poetry out of the actual city."[2] He likens her to 18th-century British poet William Blake in her ability to express the perspective of children, evoking "innocence and experience in a way that blurs the ambiguous boundary between them."[2] Pinsky also notes that Ridge preceded American Hart Crane, known for his long poem The Bridge about the Brooklyn Bridge, in her assigning "ecstatic, high language of the past, especially of the Elizabethans, to the squalid and the sublime realities of the actual, 20th-century American city."[2]

• Donna M. Allego, The Construction and Role of Community in Political Long Poems by Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Ann Arbor: UMI, 1997.
• Nancy Berke, Women Poets on the Left: Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, Margaret Walker, University of Florida Press (Gainesville, FL), 2001.
• Alfred Kreymborg, Our Singing Strength: A History of American Poetry, Coward-McCann, 1929.

• Terese Svoboda, "Lola Ridge: The Radical Modernist We Won't Forget Twice,", Boston Review, 18 Feb 2016
• Robert Pinsky, "Street Poet/ How the often-overlooked Lola Ridge became one of America's first great urban Modernists", Slate, 22 March 2011, includes links to audio recordings of her poems
• Donna Allego, "Biography: Lola Ridge", Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Works by Lola Ridge at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Lola Ridge at Internet Archive
• Works by Lola Ridge at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• The Ghetto, and Other Poems (1918), online at University of Pennsylvania Library
• Sun-Up, and Other Poems (1920)