Lola Ridge

Reproduktion des Originals: The Ghetto and Other Poems von Lola Ridge

The Ghetto and Other Poems

Lola Ridge (1873-1941) was an anarchist poet and an influential editor of avant-garde, feminist, and Marxist publications best remembered for her long poems and poetic sequences. She, along with other political poets of the early Modernist period, has been coming under increasing critical scrutiny at the beginning of the twenty- first century. Her first book, The Ghetto and Other Poems was published in 1918. The title poem portrays the Jewish community of Hester Street New York, and deals with the effects of capitalism, gender conflict and conflicts between generations on this immigrant community in ways that bear comparison to the works of Charles Reznikoff. The book was a critical success and led to her involvement with avant-garde magazines such as Others and Broom. Although never a member of any political party, she protested against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. She also supported Tom Mooney, and Warren Billings, who had been framed for a bombing at the Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco in 1916. Her third book, Red Flag 1927 collected much of her political poetry.

Sun-up and Other Poems

Elaine Sproat

A Lecture by Lola Ridge, 1919

Woman and the Creative Will

Transnational long before the term gained currency, Lola Ridge (1873-1941) was one of the most notable poets writing in America from the publication of her first book, The Ghetto, in 1918 until her death, inauspiciously, shortly before America's entry into the Second World War. Included are the complete texts of her first three books of poems, The Ghetto, Sun-Up, and Red Flag, as well as the never before published manuscript Verses (1905), the book of early poems she sought to publish in Australia before departing for America in 1907. With its publication, Lola Ridge's important place in the history of twentieth century poetry takes a significant step toward being recognized and restored.

Collected Early Works

To the Many

Sun-Up, and Other Poems is a lyrical collection by Lola Ridge. Excerpt: "It's strange about stars.... You have to be still when they look at you. They push your song inside of you with their song. Their long silvery rays sink into you and do not hurt. It is good to feel them resting on you like great white birds... and their shining whiteness doesn't burn like the sun— it washes all over you and makes you feel cleaner'n water."

Sun-Up, and Other Poems

At last recovered in this enriching annotated edition, this important but neglected work of American modernism offers a unique poetic encounter with the Jewish communities in New York’s Lower East Side. Long forgotten on account of her gender and left-wing politics, Lola Ridge is finally being rediscovered and read alongside such celebrated contemporaries as Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore—all of whom knew her and admired her work. In her time Ridge was considered one of America’s leading poets, but after her death in 1941 she and her work effectively disappeared for the next seventy-five years. Her book The Ghetto and Other Poems, is a key work of American modernism, yet it has long, and unjustly, been neglected. When it was first published in 1918—in an abbreviated version in The New Republic, then in full by B. W. Huebsch five months later—The Ghetto and Other Poems was a literary sensation. The poet Alfred Kreymbourg, in a Poetry Magazine review, praised “The Ghetto” for its “sheer passion, deadly accuracy of versatile images, beauty, richness, and incisiveness of epithet, unfolding of adventures, portraiture of emotion and thought, pageantry of pushcarts—the whole lifting, falling, stumbling, mounting to a broad, symphonic rhythm.” Louis Untermeyer, writing in The New York Evening Post, found “The Ghetto” “at once personal in its piercing sympathy and epical in its sweep. It is studded with images that are surprising and yet never strained or irrelevant; it glows with a color that is barbaric, exotic, and as local as Grand Street.” The long title poem is a detailed and sympathetic account of life in the Jewish Ghetto of New York’s Lower East Side, with particular emphasis on the struggles and resilience of women. The subsequent section, “Manhattan Lights,” delves further into city life and immigrant experience, illuminating life in the Bowery. Other poems stem from Ridge’s lifelong support of the American labor movement, and from her own experience as an immigrant. This critical edition seeks to recover the attention The Ghetto, and Other Poems, and in particular the title poem, lost after Ridge’s death. The poems in the volume are as aesthetically strong as they are historically revealing. Their language combines strength and directness with startling metaphors, and their form embraces both panoramic sweep and lyrical intensity. Expertly edited and annotated by Lawrence Kramer, this first modern edition to reproduce the full 1918 publication of The Ghetto and Other Stories offers all the background and context needed for a rich, informed reading of Lola Ridge’s masterpiece.

An Annotated Edition

The Ghetto, and Other Poems

Daniel Tobin

Poetry. Edited and with an introduction by Daniel Tobin. LIGHT IN HAND offers selections from Ridge's first three volumes of poetry that have entered the public domain: The Ghetto and Other Poems, Sun-Up and Other Poems, and Red Flag. The poems in this volume showcase Ridge's critical yet compassionate eye for the world around her, from the Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side to the bloody frontlines of World War I. Rich with finely-drawn details of person and place, Ridge's poems marry a materialist political sensibility with a deep spiritual belief in the ability of humankind to transcend the world's havoc and strife. As Ridge writes in "Obliteration" of "The emptily effacing air, / That has closed upon so many cries./ Yet holds in its blue vacuum/ No bleached white evidence," it is often the work of history to bury the cries of the oppressed, as well as those who try to speak out against injustice. It was Ridge's lifelong mission to counteract this erasure and illuminate that evidence

Lola Ridge

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