The Lyric West, Vol. 4, No. 4 (January 1925)

This January 1925 number of The Lyric West is best met through the writing itself. It contains 20 named pieces or sections, beginning with I Bring You Silence, My Beloved by Nellie Burget Miller, Lyric by Norma Miller, and Magic by Virginia McCormick. 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 George H. Dillon’s Beauty Trembled Close. The poem organizes description through sentence-length lines around “Girl, when you say that love is all — that love”; 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. William E. Scotten, Jr’s Dawn answers it from another angle: it compresses perception into short, image-bearing lines around “How would you have the day come”; pause and white space become part of the measure. The presence of a named form such as Sonnet makes the contrast especially legible: innovation occurs beside inherited measure, not after its disappearance. In Los Angeles, modernism does not erase regional or traditional verse; it puts new pressure on both, asking poets to treat rhythm and perception as unsettled problems.

The contents page also works like a small map. Early entries establish the issue’s first set of voices; around the middle, Dawn by William E. Scotten, Jr changes the view; the closing stretch reaches Indian Giver by Josephine Johnson. 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 Nellie Burget Miller, Norma Miller, Virginia McCormick, Belle Cooper, Maud Elfrid Uschold, Mary Sinton Leitch, Ruth Bernice Mead, and George H. Dillon, along with 12 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, Little magazines, and Love—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 I Bring You Silence, My Beloved by Nellie Burget Miller, turn next to Dawn by William E. Scotten, Jr, and finish with Indian Giver by Josephine Johnson. The clean reading edition is designed for that kind of movement. Original scan: 38 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.