N. H. Pritchard

N. H. Pritchard
Born	Norman Henry Pritchard (1939-10-22)October 22, 1939.
Died	February 8, 1996(1996-02-08) (aged 56) Eastern Pennsylvania
Occupation	poet
Education	NYU, Columbia

Norman Henry Pritchard, or N. H. Pritchard (October 22, 1939 – February 8, 1996), was an American poet. He was a member of the Umbra poets, a collective of Black writers in Manhattan's Lower East Side founded in 1962. Pritchard's avant-garde poetry often includes unconventional typography and spacing, as in "Harbour," or lack sentences entirely, as in " " ".

Biography

Pritchard was born in New York City to a Jamaican father and Trinidadian mother; he was raised in Harlem and the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.

He studied for a B.A. degree at New York University, where he was president of his campus Fine Arts Society and an active contributor to his college's literary magazine. Pritchard did graduate work at Columbia University, taught briefly at the New School for Social Research, and was a poet-in-residence at Friends Seminary.

Prior to his time with the Umbra Poetry Workshop, Pritchard was acquainted or became friends with many artists, writers, and poets in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, including Philip Guston, Bill Komodore, Reuben Kadish, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko , Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Paul Blackburn, and many others who would frequently meet at the Cedar Tavern near NYU.

During the years he was a member of the Umbra poets, his work appeared in magazines and journals such as Athanor, Liberator, Season, Negro Digest, Sail, Poetry Northwest, the East Village Other, and Gathering, as well as in several anthologies of African-American writing, including Walter Lowenfels's In a Time of Revolution (1969) and Natural Process, edited by Ted Wilentz and Tom Weatherly.

Pritchard's work is published in two single-author volumes: The Matrix: Poems, 1960-1970 (Doubleday, 1970) and Eecchhooeess (New York University Press, 1971). His poetry is also included in compilations and anthologies including New Jazz Poet (1967), The New Black Poetry (1969), and In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World (1969). As Richard Kostelanetz states: "Only one one-man collection of visual poetry, for instance, has ever been commercially published in the United States, even though 'concrete' is reportedly 'faddish'; and since that single book, N. H. Pritchard's The Matrix (1970), was neither reviewed nor touted, it seemed unlikely that any others would ever appear—another example of how the rule of precedent in literary commerce produces de facto censorship."

Pritchard stopped publishing in the early 1970s, and before his early death from cancer was residing in eastern Pennsylvania.

In 2021, Ugly Duckling Presse and Primary Information republished The Matrix and Adam Pendleton's DABA Press republished Eecchhooeess.

Pritchard's work was featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, "Quiet as It’s Kept"; the Biennial also used an inverted parentheses from one of Pritchard's poems as a symbol for the show.

External links

• N. H. Pritchard publications at Eclipse Archive
• On N. H. Prichard by Charles Bernstein (2004/2015), Jacket2
• On N. H. Pritchard's The Matrix and Eecchhooeess. Recovery Project by Zachary Schomburg. Octopus Magazine.
• "Lost Books Month: Guest Writer stevenallenmay Discusses The Poetry Of N.H. Pritchard", The Devil's Accountant, June 17, 2010.