The Lyric West, Vol. 4, No. 2 (November 1924)

The November 1924 issue of The Lyric West brings its writers together without asking them to sound alike. It contains 18 named pieces or sections, beginning with Five Poems by Sigrid Sittig, The Old Home by Lilian White Spencer, and Threnody by Weare Holbrook. That opening offers a direct path through the issue, but it is not the only one. A reader can follow the printed order, pause over a familiar contributor, or start with a title that catches the eye. No special background is needed. The magazine explains itself gradually through the choices it makes and through the company each piece keeps.

The number’s sharpest formal turn belongs to Weare Holbrook’s Threnody. The poem builds by refrain and recurrence around “It’s queer, because I seldom get the time”; repetition carries the poem’s turn rather than merely decorating it, bringing ordinary experience as formally unsettled lyric material into the magazine’s field of subjects. John Northern Hilliard’s Sestina of the Spieler answers it from another angle: it organizes a speaking voice through sentence-length lines around “The way I size it up, this life’s a show”; shifts in syntax make inward argument audible without abandoning stanza. The presence of a named form such as Ballad of the Scotty Mine makes the contrast especially legible: innovation occurs beside inherited measure, not after its disappearance. In this Los Angeles setting, modernism appears less as a manifesto than as a widening of permissible rhythm, image, and subject within a magazine still hospitable to rhyme.

The contents page also works like a small map. Early entries establish the issue’s first set of voices; around the middle, The Missive by Edna Constance Willard changes the view; the closing stretch reaches Personalities by May Williams Ward. The works differ in length, subject, and manner, yet their placement creates connections that a simple list of names cannot show. The pleasure comes from those changes. A short piece can clear the air after a longer one, a new voice can redirect the mood, and an unexpected title can make an earlier page look different when the reader thinks back to it.

The contributor list includes Sigrid Sittig, Lilian White Spencer, Weare Holbrook, Winifred Davidson, Dorothy Hawley Cartwright, Ada Hastings Hedges, Wilson O. Clough, and Martha Davis, along with 10 additional contributors. Some readers will arrive looking for a particular name; others will meet these contributors here for the first time. Either approach works. The publication details add useful context: the issue was edited by Roy Towner Thompson, published by The Lyric West, and issued from Los Angeles, California. A journal is also a made object, assembled by people deciding what to print, how to order it, and which voices should share a number. Reading from beginning to end lets those choices appear naturally.

The catalog subjects—Los Angeles literary culture, American poetry, and Little magazines—are useful starting points, especially for searching, but they do not set limits on what a reader may find. For a first visit, begin with Five Poems by Sigrid Sittig, turn next to The Missive by Edna Constance Willard, and finish with Personalities by May Williams Ward. The clean reading edition is designed for that kind of movement. Original scan: 36 PDF pages. Reader’s edition: 39 PDF pages. It keeps the contents in a stable, legible form and makes names and titles easier to find. A source facsimile remains part of the project’s private editorial record, but it is not included in the public upload. What appears here is the reading copy: a practical way to spend time with the issue and discover which pieces invite a return.