The Name of the Game
… and as for the vagaries of our friend Mr. Hartmann,
Sadakichi a few more of him,
were that conceivable, would have enriched
the life of Manhattan
or any other town or metropolis
the texts of his early stuff are probably lost
with the loss of the fly-by night periodicals …
— Ezra Pound, Canto LXXX
Yesterday I visited UC Riverside’s Special Collections library to check out one of the three known extant copies of George Hodel’s poetry magazine, Fantasia.1 I found it to be a more impressive effort than I had expected, having previously seen only a handful of pages Steve Hodel presented in his books and on his blog. It includes contributions from several poets. Their works generally strike me as more mature than the 17-year-old editor’s own poem “Inference” and gushing review of Ben Hecht’s neo-Decadent novella, The Kingdom of Evil. Which of the contributed poems were actually written to order for Hodel’s magazine I cannot tell.
“The Game,” by Snow Longley, sparked my interest for the title alone. The poet free-associates from a sporting contest — a college football game, perhaps — to “lustier scenes” manifesting the primordial will to power which operates throughout nature.
George Hodel’s biggest “get” in Fantasia was almost certainly Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944), the man once hailed as the “King of Bohemia.” Hodel had already profiled the “American Decadent” poet in an article, “Oriental Harmonies,” written during his 1924 stint at the Los Angeles Record.
Fantasia includes four of Sadakichi’s poems, collectively entitled “Naked Ghosts:”
Here is George Hodel’s review of future Hollywood legend Ben Hecht’s The Kingdom of Evil, the sequel to his banned book, Fantazius Mallare:
The other two copies listed in WorldCat are at the University of Texas and the New York Public Library. The UT copy comes from an interesting-sounding character by the name of Tiffany Thayer (1902-1959). There is a Ben Hecht link to Thayer which might explain how he came to possess a copy of this presumably quite obscure poetry magazine.
