Terese Svoboda - Anything That Burns You

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 GIs 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 Crocodiles 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Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published or unpublished material may be found at the end of the volume.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

Index

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, Thats 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 artistsand 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 suspectand not without cause, being themselves not the leftwing radicals of Ridges 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 sexfemale poets were ascendant just thenand her looks. Anorexic and Virginia Woolf-ethereal, she worked as an artists 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 situationbut 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 recordlike a journalist, yesbut 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 executionsbut 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? Poetrythe opiate of the people? Or does poetry do nothing, as the New Critics would have it? In Ridges case, it kept the issue alive.

Ridge was one of the first to delineate the life of the poor in Manhattan and in particular, womens lives in New York City. The title poem of her second book, Sun-up and Other Poems, is a striking modernist depiction of a girls interior life. Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry, and William Rose Bent, founder of the Saturday Review of Literature, called Ridge a genius. Four years before Eliots 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 heres 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