The Lyric West, Vol. 4, No. 8 (May 1925)

This May 1925 number of The Lyric West is best met through the writing itself. It contains 18 named pieces or sections, beginning with Apple Tree by Lilian White Spencer, Eden Was a Prison by Mary Carolyn Davies, and For All Brothers in Youth by George H. Dillon. 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.

In Giovanni Malatesta, Miriam Allen de Ford brings the issue’s modernist pressure into focus. The poem organizes a speaking voice through sentence-length lines around “Because my foot drags from me when I walk”; 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. Elsewhere, Apple Tree and Eden Was a Prison keep the experimental turn in contact with the issue’s broader lyric range. 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, Epigrams by Frank Mitvalsky changes the view; the closing stretch reaches Heritage by Borghild Lundberg Lee. 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 Lilian White Spencer, Mary Carolyn Davies, George H. Dillon, Mavis Clare Barnett, George Sterling, Joan Dareth Prosper, Velma Byers Hutchinson, and Miriam Allen de Ford, 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 Apple Tree by Lilian White Spencer, turn next to Epigrams by Frank Mitvalsky, and finish with Heritage by Borghild Lundberg Lee. 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.