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
... [Show full abstract] 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.”