Sadakichi Hartmann - Drifting Flowers & Other Verses
Public Domain Poets #10 | Publicdomainpoets.com
Containing Sadakichi Hartmann's 'Tanka & Haikai: Japanese Rhythms' (1915); selections from 'My Rubaiyat' (1913), and the earlier, 'Drifting Flowers of the Sea' (1904); and the essays 'Why I Publish My Own Books' (1915) and 'The Japanese Conception of Poetry' (1904). New edition designed, edited, and selected by Dick Whyte.
If pleasures be mine
As aeons and aeons roll by,
Why should I repine
That under some future sky
I may live as a butterfly.
Hartmann (1867-1944) was born on the island of Dejima, off the coast of Nagasaki, to a Japanese mother and German father. His mother died giving birth to his brother, and they were sent to Germany to live with relatives. Hartmann later ran away to Paris, was disinherited by his father, and sent to Philadelphia, to live with an uncle. It was there he self-published his first dramatic works, and a book of conversations with Walt Whitman.
White petals afloat
On a winding woodland stream-
What else is life's dream?
In the 1900s Hartmann started writing poetry, drawing influence from Whitman, French symbolism, and Japanese poetics, and in 1904 he published the earliest known set of English-language tanka, alongside a short essay on tanka and haiku aesthetics. In the 1910s he followed this up with a collection of linked tanka-esque blank-verse, inspired by the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and befriended writers like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Hartmann's 'Japanese Rhythms' (1916), remains one of the earliest published collections devoted to English-language tanka and haikai, followed by Noguchi's 'Japanese Hokkus' (1920), and Jun Fujita's 'Tanka: Poems in Exile' (1923).
Public Domain Press is dedicated to producing contemporary editions of out-of-print poets and poetry collections, particularly with regard to compressed and fragmented 'free verse' from the late-1800s and early-1900s. All poems start as facsimiles - to preserve the original fonts - which are then cleaned up, edited for consistency, and spaciously laid-out, adorned with borders, illustrations, and ornaments from the books and magazines they originally appeared in. These are not "reprints" of previously existing books, but newly crafted collection, lovingly edited from public domain material, for the serious poetry lover.
