Charles Fletcher Lummis — Collected Poems

Charles Fletcher Lummis turned his life into one of Southern California’s most strenuous works of self-invention. He printed poems on birch bark at Harvard, walked 3,507 miles to Los Angeles for a newspaper job, reported the Apache campaigns, edited The Land of Sunshine and Out West, built El Alisal, founded the Southwest Museum, and served as city librarian. Poetry ran through every role. Birch Bark Poems tests inherited romantic forms; the newspaper and magazine verse converts railroads, deserts, cowboys, missions, public figures, and Southwestern speech into performance; A Bronco Pegasus gathers half a century into a theatrical autobiography. Lummis opposed federal abuses of Native people while still writing through the ethnographic and racial assumptions of his era, and he celebrated California’s layered cultures while strengthening its mission romance. This edition restores the poetry without smoothing away those generative tensions.