The most referenced “early” critical account of N.H. Pritchard’s poetics is Kevin Young’s “Signs of Repression: N.H. Pritchard’s The Matrix” published summer 1992 in the Harvard Library Bulletin. Aldon Nielson’s Black Chant (1997) contains sporadic writing on Pritchard. More recently Paul Stephens, David Grundy, Charles Bernstein, Craig Dworkin, Anthony Reed, and many more have pursued critical writing on Pritchard, from book chapters to blog posts to articles. Nevertheless, a pall of mystery hangs over Pritchard’s career. As every writer is careful to note, Pritchard more or less “disappeared” from the literary scene in the 80s, and by the time Kevin Young published his article in 1992 apparently Pritchard was unable to be tracked down. Pritchard died in 1996.
Readers of Roberto Bolaño might begin to hear the trappings of a Bolaño novel in this odd sequence of events, full of attendant critical overstatement and academic fetishism for a lost writer so profound, so shocking, so experimental that he could have only appeared on the scene as a ghost, haunting what he could never be completely a part of, though was essential for nevertheless. For example, what does the following really mean: “Pritchard was probably the most experimental writer in any of the numerous scenes in which he participated.” If one is going to make such an obviously recuperative, baseless, self-aggrandizing, unscholarly non-claim, it should be done without such embarrassing performative uncertainty. The probably most experimental (?) in any of the “scenes” Pritchard participated in? Not only was Pritchard part of the formative and formidable Umbra group, he taught at The New School and, perhaps more experimentally, at old folks’ homes, and he frequently participated in events among a large group of some of “the most experimental” writers and artists of the late 20th century. The article goes on to say, “In returning to these poems, we must be careful not to reform the forms Pritchard has so carefully deformed, nor to soften their revolutionary edges—all within them that escapes regulation, policing, and capture.” And this written in the famously autonomous zone called…Artforum. On a figure like Pritchard critical vultures cast the entire projective weight of their mercenary mandate for blue-chip CV lines.
Who is such a statement meant to serve other than the heroic critic?
Please, listen, we must not reform what has been so carefully deformed by this as I suggest “probably most experimental poet of the 20th century” (I’m still working on this judgment, but let’s agree to make it, anyway, because honestly it sounds great); however, we must make an exception for some, you know, quite minor reforming, if just in this book review that happens to be published in probably the most famous art magazine there is, a publication that come to think of it will sit very nicely indeed in the public engagement section of my tenure portfolio, and that could not get published should I have taken my own mandate seriously and written something that does not soften the “revolutionary edges” of the poetry.
Let me be clear, Pritchard was part of “scenes” that included Alison Knowles, Adrian Piper, Hannah Weiner, Vito Acconci, Bernadette Meyer, Amiri Baraka, Lorenzo Thomas, Alan Ginsberg, Kamau Brathwaite, Ishmael Reed, John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Jerome Rothenberg, Richard Kostelanetz, Chris Kraus, Bob Cobbing, Bill Bisset, Ron Silliman, The Four Horseman (Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, & bp Nichol), Vito Acconci, Fluxus, etc. (and these mostly gleaned from the flyer for the 1980 12th International Sound Poetry Festival @ The Kitchen, NYC that Pritchard participated in). To wit, given the members of these scenes, the writer appears to suggest that Pritchard may have been the most experimental writer of the 20th century working in English.
Haven’t we outgrown these tired superlatives?
This is precisely what I mean by the current critical fetishization of N.H. Pritchard, a fetishization that deifies the ghost of a dead author to the “accidental” benefit of the especially discerning professor, while assuring readers that this particular writer’s work is utterly impossible to properly write about (nor should it be), except by me, the only soul capable of truly presenting this work without shearing off its revolutionary edge.
My point is not to lessen our opinion of Pritchard’s radicalism. Obviously, here I am so writing. My point is that this has become bar none the most tired cliché of contemporary literary criticism, especially in “experimental poetics.” Let us be careful not to deradicalize the radical, but let us merely suggest this must be done (by someone, somewhere!), rather than do it ourselves by actually mapping and enacting what it might mean to not simply reform the ecstatically deformed into critical academic prose that also so happens to be precisely the token of value necessary to advance my career. The problem seems obviously materialist insofar as it’s brilliant to present on the unpresentable because it legitimates in advance the “intervention” of your critical inquiry, so therefore works perfectly for an infinity of papers, book reviews, etc., i.e. one can argue endlessly for how one should really be very careful with the work they are simultaneously explicating. It is a stance that readily satisfies all that is necessary to sustain the mercenary “value-creation” of the precarious academic (read: minimum employment requirements), while doing absolutely nothing to make good on the seriousness of the claim being made, beside demonstrating that the selected writer (Pritchard, Brathwaite) was obviously more radical than you are. *Shrug.*
I want to make clear that I’m sensitive to that necessity — the academy is a brutal, close-minded, ultra-hierarchical, highly competitive “marketplace of ideas” where the spoils go to the already nepotistically advantaged and/or those that sufficiently subordinate themselves to this obvious contradiction (and better yet if both). What’s less experimental than an undergrad class at a major elite University?
This stance is ideological fodder for neoliberal orthodoxy that relies on myths of the individualist experimentalist (née avant-gardist) tragically lost to history that can only be properly rediscovered by the especially heroic (and radical!) literary critic, myths that primarily serve to justify the extreme individualism and standardization of the current neoliberal academy, and do little toward constructing a mode of poetics and inquiry sufficient not to the lost individual, nor to the academy that can only be receptive of hegemonically pre-determined certificates of value (Artforum, Contemp. Lit), but to the dialectical movement of poetics, historical and present, that offers Pritchard up to us not as the one that got away, but as a node indicative of a collective mass of prismatic experimentalism that rendered pockets of utopia still illuminating our apocalyptic present, despite our contemporary darkness.
Aldon Nielsen writes of a harrowing event that seems to me not to have been focused on enough.
“Depending upon whose account we attend to, Norman Henry Pritchard…either was kidnapped or participated in a feigned kidnapping by his colleagues in the swirl of events that marked the end of Umbra as a functioning workshop group in New York…The uncertainty surrounding these events is ironically reflected in Pritchard’s subsequent abduction, by force or benign neglect, from literary histories and from the anthologized record of African-American writing…When what was then seen as the more “nationalist” wing of the Umbra group “kidnapped” Pritchard, with or without his cooperation, all they apparently wanted was the Umbra bankbook that he held for the group and kept at his parents’ house, where he was living…Askia Muhammed Toure told Oren, “We seized Norman and refused to let him leave because we felt that if we could not be heard democratically then dog gone it the journal would not come out. We were certainly firebrands…We held Norman as hostage, drove with him to Brooklyn to his parents’ home and secured the bankbook and sat on it in order to prevent Umbra from coming out.” This is a fascinating scenario, but probably exaggerated. It would seem highly unlikely that a man taken by force (Oren has been told alternately that a gun or a knife was involved) would enter his parents’ home while the “abductors” waited and then turn over the bankbook.”
How Nielsen comes to this last conclusion completely escapes me. It would seem perfectly natural to me that if one were being held at knife or gun point outside of one’s parents’ house and let in to perform a chore under the threat of one’s life one would carry it out.
“Ishmael Reed, who was reputed to be one of the abductors, has told Oren, “I can’t imagine anyone kidnapping Norman Pritchard. He’s a large fellow, capable of taking care of himself.”
Unfortunately, a bullet does not care much for the size of the man whose skull it enters.
“By whatever means necessary, though, the bankbook was gotten out of Pritchard’s possession, and if Dent’s memory is accurate Reed must have been involved in some way, since it was Reed and “Charmy” Patterson who returned the passbook to Dent after a short period…No one thought to record Pritchard’s own account at that time. Some years later his two major collections were published, The Matrix: Poems, 1860-1970 [sic] and F.BCCHHOOE SS [sic] a year later, he appeared in a remarkable number of anthologies for a poet of his age, including Richard Kostelanetz’s collection of concrete and visual sound texts, Text-Sound Texts (1980), and then he slipped out of sight. It was as if he were not only writing in such a way as to “decompose the reader”…but to decompose himself as a persona as well.”
Nielsen goes on to give a series of close-readings of Pritchard poems.
There are many possible explanations for Pritchard’s “disappearance” and “critical neglect.” One possibility is that, like Lee Lozano, this was a deliberate turning away, one that ought to be respected, a possibility I’ve never seen anyone entertain. Perhaps he wanted to be gone. Another possibility suggested by this narrative is that perhaps the material conditions under which Pritchard lived and practiced became nastily intolerable, even threatening. My friends holding me at gun-point (maybe? as a joke?) might be enough to make me reconsider a thing or two. If there is reason to believe that Pritchard himself for whatever reason might have been “in on the joke” here I’m definitely interested in hearing about that.
But it strikes me that the situation of Pritchard’s “disappearance” might be more complicated than most accounts seem ready to suggest. Is this perhaps a consequence of experimental poetics’ textual focus, a focus that can veer in the direction of an authorless New Criticism? Perhaps instead of assuming critical neglect of Pritchard is the result of some readymade trope generalizable as structural racism, or the result of the work’s difficulty/hermeticism (that has not stopped criticism on any number of other very difficult authors), we might stop a moment to wonder, in what I will say is a nod to Adrian Piper, if perhaps Pritchard is not the victim of a literary culture predicated on the hegemonic value-creation mechanism of academic recuperation, along with a certain turn toward noxious violence against a scapegoat deemed insufficiently “nationalist” and/or political within his circle of friends and colleagues. While Pritchard taught for several periods at several institutions, it would be difficult to classify him as an academic given his lack of published prose. Though he at several points was said to be working on encyclopedic works of prose, whether fiction, history, poetics, or otherwise, a treatise on “The Monophysicity of Form” sounds decidedly Other, and might not have fallen on delighted ears at his various academic jobs. And though he was vocal about the major problem of Western civilization being racism, slavery, and genocide, there is not indication, at least to me, that he was motivated by that fact toward explicit political activism on the level of the “nationalist” violence he may have been the victim of.
Is our textual obsession and obsession with adjoining individuals to the grand sweep of history causing us to miss something essential about the particular conditions surrounding Pritchard’s disappearance?