108. Lola Ridge with Terese Svoboda

KIM: Hi, everyone, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dust off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew.

AMY: And I'm Amy Helmes. Once again, Kim, today we're discussing a writer who was all the rage in her day. Lola Ridge isn't a name many of us know today, but anyone who was anyone in New York's intellectual circles in the 1920s and 1930s knew and admired her work, wrote for the avant-garde literary magazine she edited, attended her frequent parties, and respected the zeal of her radical beliefs.

KIM: She was considered one of the preeminent poets in America, on par with e.e. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, T.S Elliot, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, and Robert Frost. Funny, not funny how we remember all their names and not hers. In addition to helping shape the ideal of what American literature of the time should be. She was speaking out about gender disparity in literature 10 years before Virginia Woolf published A Room of One's Own. In today's parlance, you might say she was "fire."

AMY: And fire was, in fact, a recurring theme in her work. She wrote five collections of poetry, which sold extremely well nationally. Her most critically acclaimed long form poem, "Firehead" based on Christ's crucifixion, was described at the time as "magnificent" and "one of the most impressive creations of any American poet."

KIM: She won a Guggenheim fellowship and a Shelley Memorial Award, but beyond those financial boosts, most of her life was spent scraping to get by.

AMY: And listeners, if you tuned into our recent episode on Heterodoxy with Joanna Scutts about the feminist intellectual women of Greenwich Village, Ridge's life story occurs within the same timeframe and locale. So she was addressing a lot of the same subjects in her poetry that were on the minds of the women of Heterodoxy.

KIM: Yes, her poetry was radical and it reflected her beliefs in anarchy, freedom and justice. She once wrote "Nice is the one adjective in the world that is laughable applied to any single thing I have ever written." You could say Ridge's verse was more hot to the touch.

AMY: And we've got a guest expert today who can tell us what made it so, so let's raid the stacks and get started. Our guest today is Terese Svoboda, author of the 2018 biography Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet. Like Ridge, Svoboda is herself a poet, having published eight collections of poetry in addition to being a novelist, memoirist, short story writer, translator and videographer.

KIM: She's won numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim, the Bobst Prize for Fiction, and the Iowa Prize for Poetry. The opera Wet, for which she penned the libretto, premiered at LA's Disney Concert Hall. In 2005, her work has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate and The Paris Review. The New York Post called her memoir Black Glasses Like Clark Kent "astounding," and The Washington Post called her Lola Ridge biography that we're discussing today "magisterial." Her forthcoming novels include the title's Dog on Fire and Roxy and Coco. We're honored to have you on the show, Terese.

TERESE: Thank you. Well, you know, next year will be the 150th anniversary of Lola Ridge's birth, so I'm really delighted to have the opportunity to alert readers to a fascinating life and amazing work.

AMY: Okay. So when I hear about a female poet from a hundred years ago that nobody remembers, my initial reaction is I'm not that surprised. I feel like there are lots of poets throughout history that we've kind of gotten over. You know, people don't read a lot of poetry anymore, so it's not that surprising that there would be poets that have faded into obscurity, but by the time I'd finished reading the introduction of your biography, I was like, " Wait one minute This is not just 'some poet.'" She was big time in her day. I mean, massively important, as we learn in your book. I kept thinking, "Why wasn't she on college syllabuses?" You know, I studied all this literature in school. Her name never came up. So when did you first discover her there and what made you want to tell her story?

TERESE: Well, I encountered Robert Penske's Slate article, " Street Poet," oddly enough. It was published in 2011 and it was the first time in 40 years of my career that I'd ever heard about her as well. The Slate article showed very little of what I later came to recognize was her really important work, but I was inexplicably wild about her, like, kismet. Um, after publishing a couple of articles about her, I signed a contract to actually write the biography with the grandson of HD.

Not only have very few of my books had a contract in advance, but to have the publisher understand her importance because of HD's acquaintance with Lola was really a godsend and I remain very grateful. 

AMY: And listeners HD, we should mention is the early modernist poet and novelist, whose name was Hilda Dolittle. She wrote under her initials HD and actually Kim, we probably need to do an HD episode at some time.

KIM: Yes, absolutely. But getting back to Ridge, this was an era when poetry was much more popular among mainstream readers. It was something we touched on in our episode. Last month, when we discussed the poet Nora May French. Terese, can you put her celebrity and perspective for our listeners?

TERESE: So when Lola was first published, poetry books were put out in front of bookstores to lure people inside, and customers for new poetry books actually fought over the titles. So poets became celebrities, particularly. Partly this was because it was the first time that so many women had published poetry, but also because sometimes they wrote sexy topics coded and clothed in poetry. Anyway, when Lola Ridge announced that she would be protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, it was front page news across the country.

KIM: Wow.

AMY: Because everybody knew who she was. 

TERESE: Yeah. 

AMY: Okay. So for the rest of us, you know, we're going into your book not knowing anything. I didn't know about her life, I didn't know any of her poetry. And what I loved about your approach to this book is that you incorporate the poetry as we go along . So we see how it all connects. It's beautifully woven together in a way that helps you understand the poetry, as it related to her life. So that was great.

KIM: Yeah. And beyond her poetry, Ridge's life, itself, is a fascinating story of adventure and reinvention. Her story begins in Dublin, Ireland, where she was born in 1873. But at the age of four, Lola sailed with her mother to Australia. Lola's mother saw more opportunity among the gold miners of New Zealand, where they eventually migrated a few years later. Though her mother had an estranged husband, Lola's father, back in Ireland, she called herself a widow and married another man in New Zealand. They settled in a mining town called Hokitika, and Ridge would later incorporate her memories and experiences from this frontier childhood in a long form poem called "Sun-up" that was published in 1920. Terese, how did New Zealand shape our young Lola?

TERESE: Well, New Zealand was at the end of a gold rush as big as San Francisco's, but it came with a socialist twist. The miners were soon unionized. Old age pensions and minimum wage were legislated and New Zealand. As you perhaps know, became the first country in the world to allow women to vote.

AMY: I did not know that.

KIM: I didn't know that either. That's great! 

TERESE: It was sort of an accident. And I won't go into that story now, but they were, and the leader was sort of an anarchist without portfolio. So anyway, when Lola was 18, her first published poem "On Zealandia" appeared in a newspaper. Uh, this was a time when newspapers featured poetry on every page and when readers were passionate about Socialism, and this is how it ends "injustice shall fall by the sword of the brave with the feds of class in an honorless grave, o'er the ruins, let freedom and brotherhood wave on Zealandia."

AMY: Mm. Okay. So she's off and running right there.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: And she's only getting started, basically. So as a young woman, right around this time period, Lola Ridge ends up getting married in New Zealand and has a child, but it wasn't a happy marriage and she wanted out. So like her mother before her, she took her child, a son named Keith, and they left. They sailed for America in 1907, but not long after her arrival, Ridge made a pretty shocking decision. Terese, can you explain? 

TERESE: Well, it may be the reason why her biography is so unknown. Um, her mother was her babysitter as that often happens, but she died when Lola was setting sail for the Us. And maybe the long trip by boat convinced her that without her mother, she couldn't care for her son or fulfill her ambitions or maybe even find a job. So she left him in an orphanage for six years. So at the time, the poor sometimes left children there for a while when they couldn't manage. And of course, the wealthy left the children for much longer in schools, and anarchists always find children to be an insoluble problem. Lola traveled to New York City, alone, via Panama Canal actually, where she reinvented herself, taking 10 years off her life, saying she was an Australian rather than a backward New Zealander and claiming she was a Us citizen. And of course, unmarried.

KIM: I love what you said about the wealthy using boarding schools. I mean, I don't know why that never occurred to me. I mean, I've always had thoughts about boarding schools but that's a really, really interesting way of thinking about it. 

AMY: And it's funny too, because we've discussed this topic of women who have left their children. Because Charlotte Perkins Gilman kind of had made a similar choice with her daughter. Um, and then even the last episode we did, with Dirty Helen Cromwell, who happened to be a prostitute, you know, a different line of work, but she made the decision as well to leave one son behind and send the other off to a private school so she could get some work done. So issues that we're still kind of dealing with today. But I do think it's harder, as modern women, to hear these stories. It's hard to know what to do with it, right? Because we can't imagine doing that in this day and age. 

TERESE: Yeah. Uh, I wonder what's changed, really. I mean, is childcare that much better?

AMY: It's not. So, yeah, I wonder too. It seems a little heartless and, and we can talk about that later, what her relationship with Keith wound up being like, if they had any real relationship, but.

KIM: I, I would say though, you know, it's the same question of when people with less money and less opportunity end up taking care of the children of other people who are wealthier, and leaving their children with their mothers or their families. So I feel like we're just in kind of a privileged position. So that's why it seems so, um, maybe unnatural isn't the right word, but I think that could be a first instinct when you hear it. But I think that people are struggling with that.

AMY: And we have tools now, like the television to sit our kids in front of. I mean, as awful as that sounds, we have other forms of babysitters that can give us a little time. 

KIM: Tablets. 

AMY: Yeah.

TERESE: …to collect our thoughts. Well, you might also consider that she did Keith a favor, too. I don't think she was going to be the world's best mother, even if, uh, she kept him.

KIM: That's a good point.

AMY: Yeah, I think you're probably right, when we get more into what her lifestyle was like at times. 

KIM: Lola had already had a modicum of success in New Zealand and Australia as a writer. And now in her mid thirties, she was finding her footing in America. She wrote potboiler novels and got involved in the anarchist movement that brought her into the orbit of famed anarchist, Emma Goldman. Goldman described Ridge as "our gifted rebel poet." So Lola also had a new sweetheart, David Lawson. She would go on to marry him, nevermind that she still had that first husband from back in New Zealand. But at one point Ridge took employment as the first manager of the Ferrer center. Can you explain what that was?

TERESE: Francisco Ferrer was a Spanish anarchist who established what was known as modern schools, which were those without allegiance to, state or church. As a result, he was executed by the Spanish government after being framed for a bombing in 1909. The Ferrer center in New York City opened a year later as a sort of community center for anarchists and it was located in St. Mark's Place. It featured lectures, language and art lessons, dancing, and lots of talk. Anarchy and socialism were de rigueur among the artists at the time, and many famous people spoke or taught at the center, such as Robert Henri Rockwell, Kent, Man Ray, George Bellows, and his roommate Eugene O'Neal and even Trotsky took art lessons. The lecturers included Margaret Sanger, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, and the most prominent anarchist of the time Emma Goldman.

KIM: What a milieu. Wow, that's incredible.

TERESE: So Lola was the center's first manager, not the easiest job to organize anarchists and especially not their children, because she eventually helped found their school. And she began a magazine for the center.

AMY: Yeah, it sounds like that job was just absolutely overwhelming and all- consuming for her. And it's, you know, going back to her decision to drop her son off at the orphanage, she wouldn't have been able to do any of this, realistically, had she been a single mother. Okay, so in 1918, she published a collection of poetry that would garner her widespread fame. It's called The Ghetto and Other Poems. The title poem, "The Ghetto" is a 22- page work that describes the immigrant community of the lower east side in New York. It reads almost like a story though, complete with various characters who live in the tenements. And her writing just transports you there. It's like stepping into that world. Uh it's so evocative and full of life. I read portions of it. I absolutely loved it. Terese, would you mind reading an excerpt from "The Ghetto" for our listeners, just to give them a feel?

TERESE: Sure. Uh, I think, the excerpt that I selected will also give you a sense of the Ferrer Center, and how Whitman influenced her because of these long lines and so forth. 

[reads excerpt]

This excerpt is clearly all about what it's like to witness an anarchist's argument over some point or some, uh, policy that they were perpetually arguing. And with anarchists, there's never any real solution, but she obviously had a very visual sense of, um, the characters themselves and the situation which she paints, without any kind of judgment, which is what I like about it.

KIM: I am obsessed with that poem. I read the whole thing and I wanna tell everyone about it. It's so engrossing. It's dark. Um, it seems pretty overtly sexual, which I was interested in, you know. I think it's 1918 was when it came out, right? So, yeah. So I'm curious about what people's response to this poem was. Why was it so well received, and what made her approach to this topic unique?

TERESE: Well, the newly founded New Republic magazine announced the publication of The Ghetto and Other Poems right there across their cover. Reviewers gushed. In the New York Post, Louis Untermeyer, the famous anthologist declared it was the "discovery of the year. Now you have to understand that at the time, the Jewish ghetto on the lower east side was a tourist attraction.

People were curious about the extreme poverty, yes, but also of the exoticism of the mostly Eastern European immigrant lives, and to some extent, the experience of immigration that their own fathers and grandfathers had undergone just a decade or so before this. 

AMY: I was just in New York with my kids and did the, um, Ellis island, you know, tour. And I thought of her a little bit. I know she didn't come in through Ellis Island, but I thought of that world while I was there. And like a lot of those people were winding up in the neighborhood that she was so accurately describing here. I mean, it's like a film almost, reading the poem. Um, people made the mistake of thinking she was Jewish, right?

TERESE: Yes, that's 

AMY: right. 

TERESE: She celebrated the otherness of the Jewish lower east side. She was one of the first to delineate the life of the poor in Manhattan, in particular women's lives.

AMY: So as we said in the introduction, Ridge went on to edit some very important literary magazines of the day, thanks to the acclaim that she earned for writing "The Ghetto." For the first magazine, called Others, she began hosting these weekly soirees in her one-room apartment. Can you paint a picture of what these parties would have been like?

TERESE: Well soirees were in. Everyone had them. But Lola's were legend, filled with modernist hot shots. William Carlos Williams was there. Lola's mentee, Jean Toomer, Mina Loy, Hart Crane, whom she edited. And of course, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Even e.e. Cummings angled for an invitation. 

KIM: Wow. That's incredible. Sounds like a party. It would be fun to go. 

AMY: The place to be full of talent and intellectuals. And I mean, can you imagine some of the anecdotes ... crazy, right? And probably, yeah, you probably don't want a little boy hanging out in the apartment.

KIM: Yeah. So we also want to talk about this important speech Ridge gave in Chicago in 1919. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

TERESE: Sure. So, what Lola did was she helped organize the sold-out speaking tour in which she spoke along with William Carlos Williams and others. Rather than to recite her poetry, however, she gave a speech entitled "Woman and the Creative Will," about how sexually-constructed gender roles hinder female development. Now this was 10 years before Virginia Woolf published " A Room of One's Own." And, uh, here's a couple of quotes: "I shall try to show that woman has not only a creative will, but a very great future in creative art." And another quote, "Woman is not, and never has been, man's natural inferior." So she was given a grant to turn the speech into a book, but then was told by Viking that no one would buy it.

KIM: Hmm. Interesting.

AMY: So a few years after the magazine she was editing, Others, folded, a new literary magazine sprung up called Broom, which was meant to showcase American literature and introduce American writers to a European readership. It was published in Europe, but Ridge was hired to serve as the American editor in the magazine's New York offices. Terese, can you tell us about that gig and also explain how she was kind of elbowed out by the men involved? 

TERESE: So spectacularly beautiful and brilliant Broom, you know, it's illustrated by all the cubists and so forth in Europe. Uh, it was founded by Guggenheim heir Harold Lowell. He went off to Europe and promptly reneged on his promise that Lola would have the last word on which Americans would be published. This, as you could imagine, rankled Lola, who had increased advertising and subscriptions substantially and had also secured the only outside support for the magazine, his mother. So nonetheless Lowell began to tire of publishing and eventually a snake in the grass, the would-be Surrealist Matthew Josephson, appeared at Lowell's side saying he would take over the magazine without any experience and so forth, but nonetheless. And this was while Lola was frantically cabling an offer herself. Josephson, knowing very little about publishing, then ran the magazine into the ground in the matter of a year.

AMY: And I mean, this is so disturbing because when she was editor, the pieces that she was commissioning, the authors she was featuring, the artists she was featuring, are these huge, new discoveries. All these names that we now know like the back of our hand, she was like, "Yeah, this guy's gonna be important, let's put him in the magazine." You know, she was kind of shaping Modernism in America, you know? Literary modernism, right?

TERESE: Yes. The only poet she really couldn't take was Getrtude Stein and they tried to stuff it down her throat, and that was definitely a point of contention.

KIM: Interesting. so, um, I wanted to circle back around to her politics and her commitment to anarchist causes, and how that was reflected in her poetry? 

TERESE: Lola seemed to have stepped off the boat and gone straight to Emma Goldman's. Emma published her and gave her advice and no doubt pushed her appointment as director of the Ferrer Center. And as I have said, Lola's background in socialist New Zealand was formative. She advocated individual liberty. She supported and wrote about not only the rights of women, but laborers, blacks, Jews, immigrants, and homosexuals. She wrote about lynchings executions, race riots, and imprisonment. She interacted closely with the most radical women of the era, uh, from editing Margaret Sanger's magazine on birth control in 1918 to reciting her own poems at Emma Goldman's deportation dinner (although, I didn't know you had a dinner for it.) But eventually Lola was arrested during the demonstration against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti and hauled off with Edna St. Vincent Millay. In 1936, watching a May Day parade in Mexico City, she raised her fist in solidarity with the marching communists, but she was not a communist. She was an anarchist, along the lines of the Russian Bakunkin, who believed he was making responsible choices by thinking for himself in Congress with democratic ideals. She felt it was the duty of poets to quote, "Write anything that burns you," as she once told an English critic.

KIM: She was completely individualistic, 

TERESE: Yes, Yeah. she was.

AMY: That incident, um, at the rally for Sacco and Vanzetti, it got a little violent, right? I mean, she got jostled around,

TERESE: Yes.

AMY: Or a horse reared up in front of her. She could have gotten hurt!

TERESE: Oh, yes. So, uh, the short story writer, Katherine Ann Porter, worked for many years as a journalist and she covered the demonstration that Lola attended, and here's her description of it. "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 horses' 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!'"

AMY: You do such a good job in your book, too, of explaining what the country and kind of the whole world was feeling during this whole thing. I mean, there was a lot of turmoil, and then when they were executed, it was just a, almost like a period of mourning for the people that were fighting till the end and hoping that wouldn't be the outcome. Um, but the context you put it all in was really well done. I felt like I was living through it a little bit, you know?

KIM: Yeah. That leads us really nicely into her poem, "Firehead," which some consider her magnum opus. It's centered around Christ's crucifixion, but it's not a religious poem, right? Can you talk about what's going on there and how it relates to this case?

TERESE: So I'm gonna be a problem here. " Firehead" did receive a lot of terrific reviews, but to contemporary poets today, the work is nearly unreadable. At the time she was under the sway of the metaphysical, a style most familiar in the work of Hart Crane, someone she published and invited to her parties. So the "Firehead's" gassy, romantic rhetoric seems to me less about the crucifixion and more about her conflict about having abandoned her son using the persona of Mary Magdalene as herself and the son as Christ bailing her shame and regret led to strange narcissistic and even erotic passages it is not her best book. Sun Up and Other Poems is, however. It's strikingly contemporary and mostly written in the voice of a "bad girl" in Australia. I so much wish that she'd written quote, "The Passage of Theresa," her successful Guggenheim proposal, which was about a mother who was unable to cope as an Australian immigrant. The proposed point of view on that book was the same girl, only a little older.

AMY: Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I want to read that too. And I'm so glad you said that about "Firehead," because I really liked all the passages from “Sun Up” and "The Ghetto." I was like, oh, this is amazing, . And then we get to "Firehead" and it's supposed to be the thing, her magnum opus, and I was thinking to myself, “Ah, this isn't for me.” So I'm glad you validated that for me.

KIM: I'm gonna be embarrassing, but I actually liked it of the parts that I read. And I loved, um, the part where Mary talks about having not loved Jesus as a son, as much as she should, and then relating that to her own experience with Keith and you know, maybe her own feelings about that. And then I also, wanted to connect it with the, um, the institutionalized murder and showing Christ as the ultimate victim of that, which then relates to the case we were talking about earlier S a cco and Vanzetti.

TERESE: Yeah, those are all very good points, uh, with regard to that book. I find Hart Crane almost unreadable too. So, you know, it was a, it was a movement branch that also didn't go anywhere.

AMY: Yeah. So it seems like the farther she's getting in her writing career, ironically, the poorer she's getting, and this was a part that frustrated me a lot about her biography. I was floored by the extent of her financial hardships. She was living hand to mouth and always begging anybody really for loans. I mean, her friends were constantly getting hit up. Like, I need more money. I need more money. And they weren't really loans because she couldn't pay them back. You know? She barely ever ate anything and we can discuss whether she maybe had an eating disorder, but I was stressed out by all this, you know, I was just like, what are you doing? And then she leaves on a trip. She decides, oh, I really wanna go travel the middle east. So she embarks on this ambitious trip. With no money, she thinks, oh, the money will come . So I didn't know whether to be impressed by all that and kind of the moxy of it, or seriously annoyed by her.

TERESE: Well, she is annoying in her insistence that she can devote herself totally to her art. I mean, I don't know, this is a gendered feeling that we have because, men have done that, but usually with a partner who takes care of the details. But anyway, she nearly starved to death in the process. She didn't marry money the way other women artists did for artistic freedom, nor did she inherit it. She did court patrons during the last era that there were patrons who were not in the end, very supportive. Uh, and she went to various artist residencies — Yaddo and MacDowell. She was conflicted there too, but in the end, I very much admired how she didn't let the lack of funds keep her from going off to anywhere really. But Europe in particular, she traveled all the way to Baghdad in the thirties one patron's check at a time she was researching a poem and felt she needed to visit Babylon. She did not lack ambition.

KIM: Good for her. And I do agree , there's probably some gender, um, judgment. When we're like, “Uggh, get it together.” Well, yeah, plenty of men just flew by the seat of their pants, so to speak.

AMY: I think it was stressing me out because I would be terrified to do that. So you're right. There's something brave about deciding “I'm gonna go to Baghdad and figure it out as I go along.” Like, my personality just would not allow me to do that. I'd be terrified. 

KIM: Yeah. You're not an anarchist.

AMY: No. That settles it. Yep. 

KIM: Um, yeah, so, she remained married to her second husband until she died in 1941, but it seemed like their marriage was fraught based on what you wrote. Though he didn't seem like a terrible guy. In fact, he seemed actually kind of supportive and sympathetic. What's your takeaway from that relationship? What was going on there?

TERESE: So she was a bigamist. Let's start there. But I think a lot of people in that very fluid time of immigration and lack of communication got away with all kinds of things, remade themselves regularly, especially during the Edwardian era. So anyway, back to David, David Lawson and Lola had their quarrels as all couples do, but for the most part, David comes across as a quite reliable guy whose only flaws were that he fancied himself an artist, too, and didn't make enough money for them. Forty years after Lola died, he published an important biography of a chess player. He finally got it together to do that. And in 1935 when Lola waltzed off to the Southwest in Mexico on a Guggenheim back in the days when that was the place to be like Berlin in the nineties, she started a relationship with a man named Alfredo. She was 61 and such attention by a younger man must have been very flattering. He used her to help him write a novel, which was never published and disappeared, but like many romantic and artistic collaborations, it didn't flourish. Alfredo left for a pack of cigarettes, as it were, and never returned. Lola, marooned by then in California, wrote David for money to return to New York city.

AMY: Yeah, I kind of felt for David. As you mentioned earlier, you know, a lot of the male writers had the support of a wife that was kind of holding up the household. It felt like David was that for her. And yeah, he was kind of feckless in terms of, he wasn't making a lot of money himself, but of the two of them, he was at least trying to keep it all together. And she was the genius, you know? She even kind of tried to get David to go have affairs and stuff, because she knew in a sense, like, I'm not the greatest wife here. I'm not available to him because of my art, you know, because of writing, I have to devote myself to that. And so she would say, "What about this girl? What about this girl?" You know? And he never really followed up on any of that, but I guess she was trying to give him an out.

TERESE: Yeah, she felt guilty about it. She had a lot of guilt about various things and had to cope with that.

AMY: And she was very ill towards the end of her life. And so she kind of did need him. He was there in the end, right?

TERESE: Well, he didn't seem all that attentive toward the end, but I don't think she was a woman who could take help. So, uh, there was no real reason for her to have no underwear at that point, for example, you know, it was a little perplexing when she was complaining about not having newspapers.

AMY: Yeah, that's just chalk it up to brilliant artists, you know? They're kooky. She's got some quirks there. Um, so yeah. Speaking of, you know, when she's dating this Mexican, Alfredo, I think she was trying to act like she was a lot younger than she actually was. And she did that all her life. She lied about her age. She, you know, lied about her husband back in New Zealand. She lied about the existence of her son that she abandoned. Um, she wasn't very truthful with the people around her, and in that sense, I would imagine that for you, it was difficult to get the straight truth about her. She seems like an unreliable narrator. Was it hard for you to be like "should I trust this? Is she b.s.-ing here?"

TERESE: So, you know, a biographer gets a feel for when a person is telling the truth or not. But you don't necessarily know about what. What were those desperate notes she left behind in 1916 about? An abortion? A book offer? A love affair? You know, she's writing from her heart, but she didn't leave enough clues to really solve those questions. But the important part is that she was enough of a public figure that her trail was legible, you know, in newspaper accounts and so forth. And luckily she and other people exchanged plenty of letters, although her handwriting was terrible. Always pick a biographical subject with good handwriting otherwise, forget it.

AMY: That's funny. That was the most difficult part. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: Um, you do a good job throughout the book too, of stopping at moments and being like, "Is this true? You know, what's going on here?" You kind of have that discussion with the reader a little bit, like, "Hmm. Let's hold up here. I'm not sure about this. She said it, but we know this." So, um, you do a good job of like walking us through it. Yeah.

TERESE: Well, the reader has to judge for themselves, frankly, you know. 

KIM: So speaking of her trail, you write in your book about how and why her legacy was completely erased not too long after her death. Can you explain that for our listeners so they can understand what happened?

TERESE: Well, The New York Times at Lola's death reported that she was one of the leading poets of the country, but she died at the nadir of leftist politics just as the US was entering World War II. So proletarian modernism, which is what she wrote, fell completely out of fashion You would think though that the Sixties generation that rediscovered feminism an anarchy would've resurrected her, but 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, partly because for the last 50 years, her executor promised a biography and a collected works and did not deliver, which obviously, uh, contributed much to her relative obscurity and neglect. Feminist critic Louise Bernikow signaled out Lola and the poet Genevieve Taggard as “twice neglected," because they were women and they were radicals part of the buried history within the buried history. What has been lost by these omissions is the radical and political tradition in 20th century American poetry. And the idea that subjects like hers are even appropriate for poetry, not only Lola's work, but an entire generation and tradition of proletariat modernism from the twenties and thirties in particular has been amputated from literary consciousness.

AMY: Do you think... like the one name we know from that time period, female poet, is Edna St. Vincent Millay. Would you say the reason we know that name is because she was just tamer? That she wasn't writing radically?

TERESE: She wrote lots of radical poems, actually. And then they were publishing in The New York Times supported by the sexual undercurrents of her work and her genius at promoting herself. I mean, Lola was the vestal virgin of poetry and not the outrageous partygoer that Edna was.

KIM: Oh, that's really interesting. Um, yeah, if she had somehow promoted herself better. And then what you said about the sixties. It's interesting, because you would think, you know, I could see where for a while some of the overtly sexual stuff might've been censored and it might've been hard at that point, but like in the Sixties, you know, maybe that would've been a good time. So maybe now, maybe we are finally in a place to take a second look at her work and also find new meaning and inspiration in it. I feel like we really need it. Would you agree?

TERESE: Sure because today the same neofascist threats that Lola experienced in the earliest years of the century and mid-century appeals to Americans and Europeans in search of order and conformity. We see 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, both increasingly treated as unnecessary to society. And I am happy to say there are now many poets who have taken up the challenge to write about social justice.

AMY: Do you think people are taking a second look at her? Have you noticed there's more of an interest in Lola in the last decade?

TERESE: Well…

AMY: Not enough. 

TERESE: Anyone who reads the biography is, uh, fascinated and I've had a lot of positive responses. There hasn't been a "Read Lola" movement, but I wish for next year that there would be.

KIM: Oh yeah. For sure. I mean, if you're not inspired to read "Firehead" after our discussion, please, please, please read "The Ghetto." It's incredible. 

AMY: I'm still not gonna read "Firehead." 

KIM: Amy's not gonna read… 

AMY: …it's not for me, 

KIM: I think it's incredible.

AMY: Yeah. And I think you're right. It's almost like we're just reliving the 1930s right now. I think that's so many times. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: It gets me down.I feel down a lot when I think about it, but then I'm also like maybe going back to some of these writers will give me hope or give me answers or, um,

TERESE: Right. They lived through it.

AMY: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So listeners, much of Lola Ridge's poetry is free to read online through Google Books or Project Gutenberg. It's not hard to find. Um, like I said, my favorites are "Sun Up" and "The Ghetto," and they really read like a story. Especially "Sun Up," is the story of a girl, um, all fascinating, but I would really encourage you to check out Terese's book because you not only get the introduction to Ridge's poetry, but you get to put it all in context. It's like having a professor sitting right with you, talking you through it.

KIM: Terese thank you for all the incredible work you did to bring Lola Ridge back into the conversation. And that was in addition to all of the other amazing work you're creating. I don't know how you do it all, but it's been wonderful to have you with us today. Thank you so much for carving out some time for us. We are so incredibly grateful.

TERESE: A pleasure. And please celebrate Lola Ridge's birthday on December 12th.

KIM: I'm noting it on our calendar and we will be shouting it out to everyone.

AMY: We'll have to figure out something very rebellious to do. I'll get on that.

KIM: An "Anything that burns you" day. I like it. 

AMY: So that's all for today's podcast. As always check out our website, lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of this show and further information.

KIM: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.