The Lyric West, Vol. 6, No. 3 (December 1926)

Open this December 1926 issue of The Lyric West and the contents begin making their own introductions. It contains 21 named pieces or sections, beginning with Christmas Shopping by Siddie Joe Johnson, Roman Marching Song by Chard Powers Smith, and The Bulbul and the Child by Mary Brent Whiteside. 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.

Wolf-Dawn by Geraldine Seelemire marks the issue’s most conspicuous opening toward modernist practice. The poem compresses perception into short, image-bearing lines around “Dawn slunk along the hills”; pause and white space become part of the measure, bringing ordinary experience as formally unsettled lyric material into the magazine’s field of subjects. Elsewhere, Christmas Shopping and Roman Marching Song 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, Two in a Garden by Lucile Perry Ames changes the view; the closing stretch reaches Into Your Beautiful Stillness by Seth Jehiel Felt. 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 Siddie Joe Johnson, Chard Powers Smith, Mary Brent Whiteside, Charles Howard Marsh, Edith B. Spaulding, Noel Stearn, Jessie Lemont, and Ada Hastings Hedges, 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 Sea and coast—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 Christmas Shopping by Siddie Joe Johnson, turn next to Two in a Garden by Lucile Perry Ames, and finish with Into Your Beautiful Stillness by Seth Jehiel Felt. The clean reading edition is designed for that kind of movement. Original scan: 36 PDF pages. Reader’s edition: 56 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.