The Lyric West, Vol. 6, No. 9 (June 1927)

Published in June 1927, no. 9 of The Lyric West gives readers several clear ways into the magazine. It contains 20 named pieces or sections, beginning with The Laughter of the Sea by Mary Carolyn Davies, The Price by Ethel Brooks Stillwell, and Cerebral by Lilian White Spencer. 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.

Modernism enters this number through Cerebral by Lilian White Spencer. The poem organizes description through sentence-length lines around “Brings down a ragged bit of rosy cloud”; emphasis shifts through image, enjambment, and changes in syntactic pace, bringing fractured perception and inward life into the magazine’s field of subjects. Ethel Brodt Wilson’s Bees in the Honeysuckle answers it from another angle: it compresses perception into short, image-bearing lines around “The bees in the honeysuckle”; pause and white space become part of the measure. 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, “Ay, but to Lose our Bottles in the Pool” by Edna Davis Romig changes the view; the closing stretch reaches Morning and Evening by Lilian Lewis. 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 Mary Carolyn Davies, Ethel Brooks Stillwell, Lilian White Spencer, Joan Dareth Prosper, Alberta Bancroft, Eleanor Titus, Alaine B. Boswell, and Hellene Seaman, 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 The Laughter of the Sea by Mary Carolyn Davies, turn next to “Ay, but to Lose our Bottles in the Pool” by Edna Davis Romig, and finish with Morning and Evening by Lilian Lewis. The clean reading edition is designed for that kind of movement. Original scan: 36 PDF pages. Reader’s edition: 51 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.