Anything That Burns You
Page 1
Also by Terese Svoboda
FICTION
Pirate Talk or Mermalade
Tin God
Trailer Girl and Other Stories
A Drink Called Paradise
Cannibal
Bohemian Girl
NONFICTION
Black Glasses Like Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan
POETRY
When The Next Big War Blows Down the Valley: Selected and New Poems
Weapons Grade
Dogs are Not Cats (chapbook)
Treason
Mere Mortals
Laughing Africa
All Aberration
Cleaned the Crocodile’s Teeth: Nuer Song (translation)
Copyright © 2015 and 2016 by Terese Svoboda
First Hardcover Edition
Printed in the United States of America
Cover Photo: Granted by permission, courtesy Jill Quasha for the Estate of Marjorie Content
Parts of this book have appeared as excerpts in the following publications: American Poetry Review, Boston Review
Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published or unpublished material may be found at the end of the volume.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Svoboda, Terese.
Title: Anything that burns you : a portrait of Lola Ridge, radical poet/Terese Svoboda.
Description: Tucson, AZ : Schaffner Press, Inc., 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015037621| ISBN 9781936182961 (hardback)
ISBN 9781936182978 (mobi/kindle) | ISBN 9781936182985 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Ridge, Lola, 1873-1941. | Poets, American--20th century--Biography. | Women poets, American--20th century--Biography. |
BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women.
Classification: LCC PS3535.I436 Z65 2016 | DDC 811/.52--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037621
ISBN: 978-1-93618-296-1
Mobi/Kindle: 978-1-93618-297-8
Epub: 978-1-93618-298-5
PDF: 978-194618-299-2
www.schaffnerpress.com
“Let anything that burns you come out whether it be propaganda or not… I write about something that I feel intensely. How can you help writing about something you feel intensely?”
—Lola Ridge
To Lauren Cerand
Table of Contents
I: Dublin, Sydney, Hokitika, Sydney, San Francisco, 1873–1907
Chapter 1
“One of Them”
Chapter 2
Ambition in New Zealand
Chapter 3
“The Smoking Fuse”
Chapter 4
The Arts in Australia
Chapter 5
Beyond Sydney
Chapter 6
Last Links with Australasia
Chapter 7
“Not Without Fame in Her Own Land”
II: New York City and Beyond, 1908–1917
Chapter 8
“Our Gifted Rebel Poet”
Chapter 9
David Lawson and the Ferrer Center
Chapter 10
“Small Towns Crawling Out of Their Green Shirts”
III: Modernism in New York, 1918–1928
Chapter 11
The Ghetto and Other Poems
Chapter 12
“Sex Permeates Everything”
Chapter 13
Others and Its Editors
Chapter 14
Soirées for Others
Chapter 15
“Woman and the Creative Will”
Chapter 16
Red Summer
Chapter 17
“We Who Touched Liberty”
Chapter 18
Sun-up and Other Poems
Chapter 19
Sunwise Turn and Ridge’s Broom
Chapter 20
Broom’s Parties and the Making of an American Idiom
Chapter 21
Broom’s Demise
Chapter 22
Finding the Means: Marie Garland and Louise Adams Floyd
Chapter 23
Politics and Red Flag
Chapter 24
“Brunhilda of the Sick Bed”
Chapter 25
Sacco and Vanzetti
IV: Yaddo, Firehead, Baghdad, Dance of Fire, Taos, 1929–35
Chapter 26
Yaddo and the Writing of Firehead
Chapter 27
Firehead’s Success
Chapter 28
Return to Yaddo: Taggard and Copland
Chapter 29
Europe on Patronage
Chapter 30
Babylon and Back
Chapter 31
The Radical Left in the 1930s
Chapter 32
Shelley Awards, a Poets Guild Prize, and a Guggenheim
Chapter 33
Dance of Fire from New Mexico
Chapter 34
Poetry in the Southwest
V: Mexico, California, New York City, 1935–1941
Chapter 35
Mexico and Romance
Chapter 36
Retreat from Mexico
Chapter 37
Anti-Woman, Anti-Experiment, Anti-Radical
Chapter 38
“The Fire of the World is Running Through Me”
Chapter 39
Legacy: Fire and Smoke
Author’s note
Bibliography
Endnotes
Index
Acknowledgments
I
Dublin, Sydney, Hokitika, Sydney, San Francisco,
1873–1907
Chapter 1
“One of Them”
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 hooves 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!”
In 1927 Lola Ridge was known to a huge public primarily as the author of The Ghetto and Other Poems, a book that portrayed the immigrant as human, struggling yes, but with hopes for the future. Sacco and Vanzetti were two such immigrants, about to be executed for crimes they most likely did not commit. Ridge too was an immigrant, having traveled across the Pacific from New Zealand. Her presence at the demonstration was announced in advance on the front page of major newspapers as an important witness to the event. She was also an anarchist when anarchy was a political possibility, especially among intellectuals and artists—and immigrants, those who had left their home country to pursue the dream of freedom in the country that promised it.
Sacco and Vanzetti were also anarchists. That alone made them suspect—and not without cause, being themselves not the leftwing radicals of Ridge’s circle, the poets and painters and critics and philanthropists who picketed with her, but gun-toting subversives looking for trouble. But all their trial revealed was a blatant disregard for civil liberties by the police, and a corrupt judicial system. The presiding judge called Sacco and Vanzetti “Bolsheviki” in public, and announced to the world that he would “get them good and proper.” Even after another criminal confessed to the charges, he would not consent to a re-trial. Leaders all over the world found the situation appalling. Nobel Prize-winner Anatole France, eloquent during the Dreyfus case in Europe, wrote in his “Appeal to the American People”: “The death of Sacco and Vanzetti will make martyrs of them and cover you with shame. You are a great people. You ought to be a just
people.” After the immigrants’ execution, fifty thousand mourners attended their funeral, and film footage of the event was considered so powerful that it was destroyed.
Ridge was an outsider capitalizing on her accent, her sex—female poets were ascendant just then—and her looks. Anorexic and Virginia Woolf-ethereal, she worked as an artist’s model when she first arrived in the U.S. Tiny, yet always described as tall, she stood up to the rearing horse outside the Charleston State Prison, baiting the police officer to turn her into another martyr. “All in the one beating moment, there, awaiting the falling/Cataract of the hooves,” she wrote, describing the confrontation in her last book, Dance of Fire.
Would we remember Ridge now if she had died under that horse? Ridge dead would have emphasized the seriousness of the situation—but the situation was already serious, people all over the world were demonstrating. Sacco and Vanzetti would, most likely, have been executed anyway, given the vehemency of the judiciary. The obligation of the artist, and especially the artist-celebrity, is to witness and record—like a journalist, yes—but also to express their feelings about what they see. Such a highly charged public event had emotional repercussions with a great number of people. Perhaps Ridge recognized that by living to write more poems, she might lessen the number of executions—but she did not step back. Did the poems she wrote in the aftermath relieve her submerged guilt, anguish and frustration and that of the public? Were the poems, in other words, counter-revolutionary? Poetry—the opiate of the people? Or does poetry do nothing, as the New Critics would have it? In Ridge’s case, it kept the issue alive.
Ridge was one of the first to delineate the life of the poor in Manhattan and in particular, women’s lives in New York City. The title poem of her second book, Sun-up and Other Poems, is a striking modernist depiction of a girl’s interior life. Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry, and William Rose Benét, founder of the Saturday Review of Literature, called Ridge a genius. Four years before Eliot’s bleak and anti-Semitic “The Waste Land,” her equally long poem “The Ghetto” celebrated the “otherness” of the Jewish Lower East Side and prophesied the multiethnic world of the 21st century. “An early, great chronicler of New York life,” wrote three-time poet laureate Robert Pinsky in a Slate column about Ridge in 2011. She embraced her subject along Whitmanian lines, yet here’s a small bomb of a poem likened to the poetry of H.D. and Emily Dickinson, that remains a model of imagist engagement with the world:
Debris
I love those spirits
That men stand off and point at,
Or shudder and hood up their souls—
Those ruined ones,
Where Liberty has lodged an hour
And passed like flame,
Bursting asunder the too small house. (Ghetto 43)
At the end of the teens and early 1920s, when Ridge was one of the editors of Others and then Broom magazine, she presided over Thursday-afternoon salons filled with modernist hotshots. Eating slices of Ridge’s cake and drinking whatever Prohibition would allow (and not), William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon hatched plans for their magazine Contact, 20-year-old Hart Crane flirted with everyone in sight, Marianne Moore read early drafts of her own work, and Mayakovsky stomped on her coffee table.
In 1919, Ridge gave a speech in Chicago entitled “Woman and the Creative Will,” about how sexually constructed gender roles hinder female development—ten years before Virginia Woolf wrote “A Room of One’s Own.” “Woman is not and never has been man’s natural inferior,” Ridge announced. Although she wrote little personal poetry, Ridge advocated individual liberty. She supported not only the rights of women, but laborers, blacks, Jews, immigrants, and homosexuals. She wrote about lynching, execution, race riots, and imprisonment. As a rebellious lefty, she interacted closely with the most radical women of her era, from editing Margaret Sanger’s magazine on birth control in 1918, to reciting her own poems at Emma Goldman’s deportation dinner. Eventually she was arrested during the demonstration against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti and hauled off with Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1936, watching a Mayday parade in Mexico City, she raised her fist in solidarity with the marching communists.
Despite the praise she received in her obituary in 1941, which described her as one of the leading poets of America, few have heard of her today. She died at the nadir of leftist politics, just as the U.S. was entering World War II. By then Eliot and Pound had very effectively equated “elitism” with “good” in poetry. Surely the 60s generation that rediscovered feminism and anarchy would have resurrected her. Not quite. Although her work appears in two important anthologies of the period, and her life as an anarchist should have had great appeal to the revolutionary spirit of the time, her poetry was not revived. For the last forty years, her executor has promised a biography and a collected works, contributing much to Ridge’s relative obscurity and neglect. Feminist critic Louise Bernikow singled out Ridge and Genevieve Taggard as twice-neglected because they were women and radicals, part of “the buried history within the buried history.” Although poetry has always addressed society’s problems and recorded its cultural and political history—whatever its formal precepts—society has not always wanted to hear about these subjects. What has been lost by these omissions is the radical and political tradition in twentieth-century American poetry, and the idea that such subjects are even appropriate for poetry. An entire generation and tradition has essentially been amputated from literary consciousness. Today, the same neo-fascist threat that Ridge experienced in the earliest years of the century appeals to Americans and Europeans now in search of order and conformity. An increasing disparity between rich and poor, revived racist agendas, a redefinition of torture, seemingly ineradicable war, violence toward immigrants, and a discounting of art and culture, increasingly treated as unnecessary to society. The truncated branch of poetry that Ridge represents should remind readers that the discourse of today does not have to take the form that it does, and that many self-evident truths are actually hysterical responses to change or threats to privilege. Poets should have a continuing presence in dissent from those “truths.” “I write about something that I feel intensely,” Ridge told an interviewer, “how can you help writing about something you feel intensely?” The freedom she exercised came at a time when the Russians were in revolution—and a urinal was put on a pedestal by the Baronness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, not Duchamp. Politics + art + free expression + women = fire, Ridge’s favorite image. In 2014’s Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology included her work, prompting Publisher’s Weekly to note: “even sophisticates can still make discoveries here, among them Lola Ridge.” Perhaps Ridge’s time has come at last.
Born in Ireland, Ridge asserted that she was “a descendant on my mother’s side of a very old Irish race of Princes.” As unlikely as that seems, a distant contemporary relative produced a document that traced Ridge’s lineage in a direct line from Hemon, king of Ireland, and Scota, the daughter of the king of Egypt, and descent from the last prince of Briefney. The report was extracted from 70 pages of genealogical detail dictated by Ridge’s grandfather, John Reilly, with six critical pages verified by the Biographical Society of Ireland.
I, John Reilly, a retired officer collector of Customs in Her Majesty’s service, and eldest son of John Lazarus Reilly, claim to be the Representative Head of the Reilly family in the 8th generation, lineally descended through the elder branch from Edmond who died in 1601, being the last reigning prince of Eastern Briefney…
Ridge’s branch of the family lived in Loughrea, in the county of Galway. Built around the mile-wide Loughrea Lake fed by seven springs, in 1846 the market town had 5,000 inhabitants living among the remains of a castle, a garrison, a nunnery, a monastery, a lovely promenade, two branch banks, an extensive and long-established brewery, two tanneries, six corn mills, and three hotels. Ridge’s paternal grandfather, Joseph H. Ridge, worked as an attorney in Loughrea and in North Dublin where he and Ridge’s maternal grandfather
would move before 1867. Perhaps like many who had means, they fled to Dublin to avoid the worst of the famine that reduced County Galway’s population by nearly a third, decimation that included sending boatloads of orphan girls sent off to Australia. Ridge’s maternal grandmother, Maria Ormsby Reilly, died in 1868. She left behind Ridge’s mother, Emma, the second to youngest, with five more sisters and three brothers.
By 1869, the widower John Reilly had retired to St. James Terrace, Dolphin’s Barn in Dublin, in an area known as The Back of the Pipes, the location of a waterworks for the River Poddle for 400 years. James Joyce knew the place well, mentioning it eight times in Ulysses, most immortally in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy: “then I wrote the night he kissed my heart at Dolphins Barn I couldn’t describe.” Two Dolphins Barn is where Bloom lives—the house right next to the Reillys’. The Back of the Pipes was a popular place for courting couples, and featured a “stone sofa” at St. James Walk. The Victorians were desperate for a place to get away to do their courting: later and fewer marriages were a marked characteristic of Irish society of the time. John Reilly’s eldest daughter, Maria, married an attorney when she was 28. Emma may have been in her early thirties when she wed medical student Joseph Henry Ridge in 1871, presumably the son of the same-named attorney who had lived in Loughrea, where they were raised. Born two years later, on December 12, 1873, Lola Ridge was wanted and cherished as an only child tends to be, and that love was reciprocated.
Mother
Your love was like moonlight
turning harsh things to beauty,
so that little wry souls