N. H. Pritchard

Norman Henry Pritchard, or N. H. Pritchard (October 22, 1939 – February 8, 1996),[1] 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.[2] Pritchard's poetry is considered avant-garde. His poems often include 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, being raised in Harlem and the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn N.Y. 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.[1] He did graduate work at Columbia University, and taught briefly at the New School for Social Research and was a poet-in-residence at Friends Seminary.[1] 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)[1] and Natural Process, edited by Ted Wilentz and Tom Weatherly.[3]

Pritchard's work was published in two books and three journals: The Matrix: Poems, 1960-1970 (Doubleday, 1970) and Eecchhooeess (New York University Press, 1971) New Jazz Poet(1967), The New Black Poetry(1969), and In a Time of Revolution: Poems from Our Third World(1969).[4] 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."[5]

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

In 2022 Pritchard's work was featured in The Whitney Museum's Biennial "Quiet as it's Kept." The Biennial used a symbol )(, an inverted parentheses, from a Pritchard poem featured in the exhibit as a symbol for the show.

The Matrix and Eecchhooeess, Pritchard's only published works to date, were recently republished after fifty years out of print by Ugly Duckling Presse/Primary Information and artist Adam Pendleton's DABA Press respectively.

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. They included 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 "Old Cedar Tavern" near NYU.

References
  1. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism, Cambridge University Press, pp. 130-133, 136.
  2. Mentioned by James Hill writing about "Thomas Covington Dench", in Emmanuel Sampath Nelson (ed.), African American Dramatists: An A-To-Z Guide, Greenwood Press, 2004, p. 135.
  3. "Pride And Militancy Reflected In Poems", review in The Virgin Islands Daily News - February 26, 1971.
  4. "N. H. Pritchard". Poetry Foundation. Poetry Magazine. Retrieved February 16, 2019.
  5. "Why Assembling (1973)", Richard Kostelanetz.com
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