The Lyric West, Vol. 3, No. 10 (February 1924)

The February 1924 issue of The Lyric West brings its writers together without asking them to sound alike. It contains 39 named pieces or sections, beginning with Spring Tarries Long by Norma Miller, White Burial by Howard McKinley Corning, and Spark Out of Heaven by John Russell McCarthy. 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.

Here the break with genteel lyric convention begins in Gwendolen Haste’s The Woman of Windy Flat. The poem organizes description through sentence-length lines around “She used to run to the clump of cedars”; emphasis shifts through image, enjambment, and changes in syntactic pace, bringing ordinary experience as formally unsettled lyric material into the magazine’s field of subjects. Chang Yo-hsu’s Spring River: Flowers and Moon at Night answers it from another angle: it uses rhetorical punctuation to disturb an otherwise measured line around “Spring river and tide waters find the sea level”; exclamation and question become rhythmic events. The presence of a named form such as Sonnets to a Little Girl makes the contrast especially legible: innovation occurs beside inherited measure, not after its disappearance. The issue catches Los Angeles poetry culture in transition: polished song remains public currency, but modernist compression and contemporary speech have begun to alter what a lyric can hold.

The contents page also works like a small map. Early entries establish the issue’s first set of voices; around the middle, Glamour by Margaret Widdemer changes the view; the closing stretch reaches Sonnet by J. Corson Miller. 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 Norma Miller, Howard McKinley Corning, John Russell McCarthy, Arthur C. Inman, Loretta Roche, Gwendolen Haste, Margery Swett, and Chang Yo-hsu, along with 27 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 Spring Tarries Long by Norma Miller, turn next to Glamour by Margaret Widdemer, and finish with Sonnet by J. Corson Miller. The clean reading edition is designed for that kind of movement. Original scan: 36 PDF pages. Reader’s edition: 65 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.