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In the news: Constance Woolson, Pamela Moore, Lola Ridge … and this site

woolsonmooreridge

Neglected women writers have been making the news in the last month:

From the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, articles marking the release of Anne Boyd Rioux’s biography, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, as well as Miss Grief and Other Stories, a collection of Woolson’s short stories.

From Marie Claire, “The Sylvia Plath You’ve Never Heard Of,”, a fascinating piece by Koa Beck about Pamela Moore, whose precocious debut, Chocolates for Breakfast, established an artistic mold she never managed (or was allowed) to break out of.

From The New Republic, “The Forgotten Feminism of Lola Ridge,” by Terry Svoboda, adapted from her biography, Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, published last month by Schaffner Press. Ridge’s poem, “Train Window,” was reprinted here a year ago.

And, in other news, from the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, “The Custodian of Forgotten Books,” a short piece about this site and yours truly.

“Train Window,” from Sun-Up and Other Poems, by Lola Ridge (1920)

trainwindow

Train Window

Small towns
Crawling out of their green shirts …
Tubercular towns
Coughing a little in the dawn …
And the church …
There is always a church
With its natty spire
And the vestibule–
That’s where they whisper:
Tzz-tzz . . . tzz-tzz . . . tzz-tzz . . .
How many codes for a wireless whisper
And corn flatter than it should be
And those chits of leaves
Gadding with every wind?
Small towns
From Connecticut to Maine:
Tzz-tzz . . . tzz-tzz . . . tzz-tzz. .

from Sun-Up and Other Poems, by Lola Ridge
New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920

Available on the Internet Archive: Link

This is one in a series of neglected poems taken from the Internet Archive.