The Dublin-born poet, Lola Ridge (1873-1941), is remembered for her powerful poetry that spoke up for the marginalised of the industrial age and covered issues of race and gender. She led a very interesting life that brought her from Ireland at age four to live in New Zealand and Australia before moving to America. I have just written an Irishman's Diary about her in the Irish Times newspaper. Read it here.
Lauded by the New York Times as "one of America's most important poets" on her death in 1941, Dublin-born Ridge lived a very full life, moving from Ireland at a very young age with her mother to live in New Zealand and then Australia before setting up home in the United States. Soon after arriving in America, she left her eight year old son, Keith, in an orphanage in Los Angeles under an assumed name.
It is unclear what her rationale was in leaving the child in the orphanage, but it has been speculated that she thought that she would struggle to provide for the two of them in New York and that he would have a better life in the orphanage. She was subsequently reunited with him, but the relationship seems to have been a strained one.
Her biographer, Daniel Tobin, said that Ridge was "perhaps the most impassioned and certainly the most authentic of the proletarian poets of the New York modernist avant-garde".
Tobin also said that Ridge "chose no party but espoused the cause of the downtrodden everywhere in the world. Her struggle became an intensely spiritual one... She absorbed interest in the vast and tragic upheaval of the times, was prophetically intense..."
Ridge held weekly literary salons at her one-room apartment on East 14th Street. Regular attendees include William Carlos Williams, Alfred Kreymborg and the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. These poetry readings and gatherings were a place for the literary world to meet and discuss new work and champion up and coming writers. Ridge mentored several new young writers at these events. The atmosphere is captured below 👇
'No money, but piles of sandwiches' - From the 'William Carlos Williams Newsletter':
"Lola Ridge, a wonderful person, lived in New York and had a kind of salon for writers. She was what we might call a communist today, very extreme in her views. She had no money herself but she had piles of sandwiches for the "starving poets" - she would tell people she was at home on Monday or Tuesday night. I went once - Bill used to go in every two or three weeks and loved it. Marianne Moore, John Reed - all kinds of people went, a lot of them for the sandwiches".
If you want to find out more about Lola Ridge and her poetry, check out this entry on the RTE Herstory website and this entry on the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre website.
