Journal Issue
Here the break with genteel lyric convention begins in Ellen Coit Elliott’s Prima Donna of the Negro Jazz Orchestra. The poem organizes a speaking voice through sentence-length lines around “I am the lemon-lily queen”; 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, Santo Domingo-Easter and Rose and Gardener 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.
Contributors
Publication details
Full contents
- Santo Domingo-Easter — Lilian White Spencer [Poem, p. 3]
- Rose and Gardener — Claribel Weeks Avery [Poem, p. 4]
- For April — Saidee Gerard Ruthrauff [Poem, p. 4]
- April Magic — Grace Atherton Dennen [Poem, p. 5]
- Spring Beauty — Harold Vinal [Poem, p. 7]
- The Gardener — Harry Noyes Pratt [Poem, p. 8]
- Bulbs — Jessica Nelson North [Poem, p. 9]
- How They Grew — Kate Randle Menefee [Poem, p. 9]
- Nasturtiums — Vivian Aten Long [Poem, p. 10]
- Shirley Poppies — Lillian Sutton Pelee [Poem, p. 10]
- April Illusions — Snow Longley [Poem, p. 10]
- Blue-Bird Time — Nancy Lee Howe [Poem, p. 11]
- The Book of the White Birch — Eleanor M. Denny [Poem, p. 12]
- “At Shut of Evening Flowers” — Nancy Buckley [Poem, p. 12]
- IN THE-MOON-OF-RED-BLOOMING-LILIES — Portia Martin [Poem, p. 13]
- Aspens — Portia Martin [Poem, p. 13]
- The Fog — Esther Clark Hill [Poem, p. 14]
- The Beggar — Jack Hyatt, Jr [Poem, p. 15]
- To the Burrowing Kind — Marie Emilie Gilchrist [Poem, p. 19]
- Dawn Wind — Marie Emilie Gilchrist [Poem, p. 19]
- Personality — Helene Searcy [Poem, p. 20]
- April Dawn — Helene Searcy [Poem, p. 20]
- The Bright Blasphemy — Joseph Auslander [Poem, p. 20]
- Someday Your Beauty Will — Joseph Auslander [Poem, p. 21]
- Prima Donna of the Negro Jazz — Ellen Coit Elliott [Poem, p. 22]
- Vanity — Hellen H. Holladay [Poem, p. 23]
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Copyright remains with the respective authors, artists, publisher, or successors.
Copyright Status Unresolved
Rights in the individual contributions and the periodical compilation have not been fully resolved.
*The Lyric West*, vol. 2, no. 1, April 1922. Text/Tech Journals, reader’s edition.