In the fall of 1931, William Carlos Williams wrote to e. e. cummings, requesting poetry for a little magazine he was editing with Nathanael West. It was called Contact. (Actually, the magazine was a revival of a previous publication that Williams had put out in the early 1920s with Robert McAlmon.) The response Williams received from cummings accurately, albeit somewhat parodically, characterized the magazine's ambitions. If Contact was to be more than merely another magazine devoted to “good writing,” the editors felt – in a decidedly less ironic vein – that it had to be “redblooded,” “stark,” “fearlessly obscene.”