On N.H. Pritchard’s The Matrix and Eecchhooeess.

Recovery Project by Zachary Schomburg

N.H. Pritchard was born in 1939. The N stands for Norman. He was a major contributor to Umbra, the magazine for the Black Arts Movement. He published two books of poetry, The Matrix (Doubleday 1970) and Eecchhooeess (NYU Press 1971). Both books are remarkable in their design, minimal and strange. In The Matrix, for example, some pages repeat a single word so it looks like a line or lattice work, others have a large circle, others are a mish-mash of letters that look like a word puzzle, and one consists of one gigantic upside down capital T. Pritchard’s face is on the cover. He looks like Lando Calrissian. They are books that use the entire page like a canvas—Eecchooeess even more so, as pages seem to link together, shapes formed by words, letters, and numbers continue onto the next page as if it were designed to fold out into a larger piece. To my knowledge, neither book was ever reviewed and there has since been very minimal attention paid to his work outside a 1992 essay by Kevin Young, “Signs of Repression: N. H. Pritchard's The Matrix,” and 1997 discussion of Pritchard in A.L. Neilsen’s Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Pritchard was considered a jazz poet and performed his poetry on a few jazz compilations such as New Jazz Poets Collection (1962-1970).

Despite knowing his poetry is considered to be jazz on the page, my very first reaction to Pritchard’s poems in both The Matrix and Eecchhooeess are as visual poems, or pieces of textual art that would be as at home on the white walls of a museum of modern art as they would be in a book or on an L.P. These poems, particularly from pages 54-112 in The Matrix and, with a few pages of exception, all of Eecchhooeess, are seemingly conscious only of their placement within a physical space, the arrangement on the page, causing text to operate like image. But they make linguistic choices as well. The word “crowds” butts up against itself over 500 times on one page in Eecchhooeess. I feel inclined to show more examples here, but am unable to because my text is defined by its borders so any attempt would be to improperly cite his work. But imagine this: nothing but the number 2 on the entire page without any white space, or a giant version of the word “FROG,” line break after the “FR” and at a 45 degree angle. So approaching the composition of these poems is parallel to approaching the composition of image on a canvas. Pritchard forces his reader to consider the texture of these poems and the interaction or manipulation of the physical space of the page, and even his font choices. When meaning can be derived from content, the texture of the poem is never considered, but with Pritchard, it is often all the reader is given: so we arrive at meaning from spatial relationships and texture, like in artwork.

In The Matrix, when the “O,” repeated sporadically throughout the latter half, is stripped from any contexts, it becomes a visual symbol heavy with a variety of meanings: most importantly, perhaps a symbol recognizable beyond all cultural/language barriers: a vowel sound, a numerical/value concept (zero/nothing), a geometrical concept (perfection/pi), a hole (an entry/exit or trap), a hoop, unification, a timeline, a tool, etc. Also, because the reader has been made hyper-aware of the texture of the poem, he/she may acknowledge the O (or any texture for that matter) that bleeds through via light onto the next page on the other side. The pages of this edition are very thin. Because the bleed-through exists, it must be considered (what words fit into the O—in one instance, “conjured” fits perfectly and singularly (18)), whereas in typically content-driven poetics, the bleed has no impact on the poem at hand.

But when searching for meaning by actually reading the text (literally sounding out scattered letters instead of just looking at them) I’ve realized that this is in fact music. These are sound poems. In Eecchhooeess, the repetition of “as a” operates like a brush drum in a jazz quartet (think of the chuga chuga of a distant locomotive). When the “as a” repetition is read in its entirety, a very patient rhythm is established and, then, when over time (time lapses in these poems, like in music) the repetition of “hoo hooz” is added to enhance the rhythm (think of the locomotive’s whistle):

as a

as a

as a

as a

as a

as a

as a

as a

as a

as a

as a hoo hooz

as a hoo hooz

as a

as a

as a hoo hooz

as a hoo hooz

as a

as a

as a hoo hooz

as a hoo hooz

as a

as a

as a hoo hooz

as a hoo hooz

as a

as a

as a hoo hooz

as a hoo hooz

as a

as a

as a hoo hooz

as a hoo hooz

as a

as a

as a hoo hooz

as a hoo hooz

And so on. The rhythm that is established as a result is jazz. Influenced by his Language poetics contemporaries, the sounds the words and the shape of the reader’s mouth when they’re uttered, is where meaning comes from (similar to the way that meaning can come from a saxophone) instead of the agreed-upon definition of the chosen word. And the music does not dissipate when these collections break down into text art, but instead become vibrations of sound/music. Not unlike the avant-garde jazz of the 1950’s or jazz fusion, Pritchard’s doesn’t approach meaning through narrative or melody, but through vibrations: vibrations of life, black life, urban life, jazz culture, pre-hip-hop, vibrations of what was more directly encountered in the literature of the Black Arts Movement.

Pritchard did not signify the end of the avant-garde. This is not apocalyptic poetics. His extreme experimentation or anti-poetry poetics is still firmly grounded safely within the framework of poetics of artifice that Bernstein called for. These are poems that foreground, entirely, in this case, the artifice, but they still offer readability and reason. In reading Pritchard, I’m reminded of at.least. by P. Inman (Krupskaya 1999): Inman places periods after every word much like the periods/ellipses that occur after every letter in .d.u.s.t.:

.m.a.w..o.f..w.a.n.i.n.g..r.u.n.g..t.h.e.i.r..l.i.k.e. .

.b.r.a.z.e.n..p.r.e.c.i.o.u.s..t.h.r.e.a.d.s..p.o.u.r.e.d. .

.b.e.n.e.a.t.h..u.p.o.n..w.i.l.t..b.e.a.k. .

.w.h.o.l.e..v.o.l.l.e.y..p.a.r.c.h.e.s. ….

.s.t.a.r.c.h..m.e.a.t.s. . . . .

.b.r.i.m…s.i.n.u.o.u.s….. … . .

.w.h.i.m.s..o.f..g.l.e.e.i.n.g..r.o.u.n.d. .

.c.r.o.o.k.e.d..d.r.a.u.g.t.h.y..c.r.a.w.l.s.. .

.d.e..e.p..c.o.w.e.r.s. . .. . ….

.t.a.t.t.e.r.e.d..a.n.d..s.t.i.t.c.h.e.d..b.o.n.e.s. .

.s.p.r.i.n.k.l.e.d..b.e.c.a.u.s.e. . . .

With both Pritchard and Inman, the reader thinks he/she must read through the artifice. So the periods, spaces between letters, etc are ignored. But this need is only triggered because of years of reading poems without fore-grounded artifice, where a certain pace of reading is expected. Perhaps this is no different than fast-forwarding the scarce and fractured melody of John Coltrane to get to the more listenable refrain. In other words, these are not poems to be read, but listened to, patiently. You should take a breath between each sound of each letter. Really. It is traditionally-read poetry that is disabling our reading of Pritchard, and not necessarily Pritchard that is somehow capping the forward progress of traditionally-read poetry.

The Matrix can be read in its entirety here:

http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/MATRIX/matrix.html

Eecchhooeess can be read in its entirety at here: http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/ECHOES/echoes.html

Hear a 30 second clip of Pritchard reading “Gyre’s Galax” from New Jazz Poets Collection here:

http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/MP3Player.aspx?TAID=29070

Buy the whole album here: http://www.folkways.si.edu/search/AlbumDetails.aspx?ID=1689#