The Lyric West, Vol. 4, No. 5 (February 1925)

Open this February 1925 issue of The Lyric West and the contents begin making their own introductions. It contains 18 named pieces or sections, beginning with Faggots by Joan Dareth Prosper, Two Poems by Sydney King Russell, and Paris — 1923 by Paul Tanaquil. 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.

River Songs by Norma Miller marks the issue’s most conspicuous opening toward modernist practice. The poem organizes a speaking voice through sentence-length lines around “The magnificence of your lacquered barge comes”; shifts in syntax make inward argument audible without abandoning stanza, bringing ordinary experience as formally unsettled lyric material into the magazine’s field of subjects. Beulah May’s The Color of the Night answers it from another angle: it organizes description through sentence-length lines around “You are to me the color of the night”; emphasis shifts through image, enjambment, and changes in syntactic pace. Short lyrics, longer sequences, and unevenly unfolding free verse share the same contents list, making formal difference part of the issue’s reading rhythm. 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, Two Lyrics by Betty Dickinson Frazee changes the view; the closing stretch reaches View Point by Ruth Clay Price. 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 Joan Dareth Prosper, Sydney King Russell, Paul Tanaquil, Norma Miller, Charles Wharton Stork, Ruth E. McKee, Raymond Kresensky, and Beulah May, 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 Faggots by Joan Dareth Prosper, turn next to Two Lyrics by Betty Dickinson Frazee, and finish with View Point by Ruth Clay Price. The clean reading edition is designed for that kind of movement. Original scan: 36 PDF pages. Reader’s edition: 41 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.