Sadakichi Hartmann — Southern California Poems and Fragments

Sadakichi Hartmann’s real poetic career belongs to New York, Boston, San Francisco, and the wandering bohemia of the turn of the century—not to Los Angeles. He returned west in 1923 only after his major poetry books had appeared, moved through Hollywood in the 1920s, and spent much of his later life around Beaumont, Banning, and the San Gorgonio Pass. This small edition therefore does not reprint Drifting Flowers of the Sea, My Rubaiyat, or the early tanka and haikai merely because Hartmann later revised or reissued them in California. It keeps only the late poems and fragments that can reasonably be connected with his Southern California years, while marking what is securely dated and what remains uncertain.