Seccession comes to Jacket2

The intrepid Danny Snelson has, as part of Jacket2's "Reissue" section, created an amazing new archive of all the issues of Secession (1922-24), a little magazine which served to counter both "Harold Loeb’s Broom on one side and Margaret Anderson’s Little Review on the other."

Secession, founded by Gorham B. Munson and edited by Kenneth Burke, John Brooks Wheelwright, and Matthew Josephson (often operating under the nom de plume Will Bray), shifted from Vienna, Berlin, New York, Florence, and Reutte (Tyrol), and was intended for the "younger generation" of literary modernists. It published many American poets and critics in addition to translations of key works by Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, and Hans Arp. From Secession no. 2, 32:

Secession aims to be neither a personal nor an anthological magazine, but to be a group organ. It will make group-exclusions, found itself on a group-basis, point itself in a group-direction, and derive its stability and correctives from a group. True, is has as yet no detailed manifesto and no organized group behind it. Its writers are scattered all over th world and have no common headquarters or generally sanctioned plans. Yet if one examines the writings of Kenneth Burke, Malcolm Cowley, E. E. Cummings, Foster Damon, Mark Turbyfill, the first two numbers of Secession, it is clear, I think, that there is a sizable corps of young American writers working substantially in the same direction, battling with similar problems, and achieving results which can be assembled in a fairly homogeneous review. Secession exists unreservedly for these and their kin.

W.C. Williams and Hart Crane were also notably in the ranks. "Secession also provided an outlet for Ivor Winter’s Notes on the Mechanics of the Poetic Image, devoting the entirety of its last issue to its publication," Snelson writes. And did Winters change the spelling of his name just for it? Curious. The editors also looked closely at what might happen to a review beyond the two-year "premeditated" run. Munson writes:

Beyond a two year span, observation shows, the vitality of most reviews is lowered and their contribution, accomplished, becomes repetitious and unnecessary. Secession will take care to avoid moribundity.

(Secession no. 1, 25)

Snelson also selects some gems for the reissue, including the following, from Secession no. 5, p. 26:

CORRESPONDENCE.

To Secession.

Every man, it is prophesied, must eventually become his own brewer. Certainly, every man must already import his own art from Central Europe. The Dial, as official importer, lands too many dead fish .... Portrait of Richard Strauss by Max Liebermann (geboren 1847, now President of the Berlin Academy of Arts), Richard Specht on Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig on Dickens .... we produce this sort of stuff in vast quantities on this side, too. I recommend as a counter-irritant the Hungarian activist review, MA, edited by Ludwig Kassák. MA excels in experimental typographical composition, reproduces the latest work of Moholy-Nagy, Raoul Haussmann, Jacques Lipshitz, Picabia, Van Doesburg, Mondrian, Gleizes, Léger, Tatlin, Viking Eggeling, Man Ray, the Russian constructivists, and photographs of beautiful bridges, machines, and New York, and publishes translations from the avant-garde writers — in Germany, France, Russia and America, the last being represented so far by Malcolm Cowley, Gorham B. Munson, and William Carlos Williams.

Nb! The contents are almost exclusively male, with the sole exception of Marianne Moore, who contributed her poem "Bowls" to issue no. 5. Please do visit Jacket2 to download every splendid issue of Secession's two-year run.