In this episode we discuss the “Objects” section of N.H. Pritchard’s The Matrix (recently republished by Ugly Duckling Presse and Primary Information, 2020), and Craig Dworkin’s essay on Pritchard from Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality (University of Chicago, 2020). We are joined by special guest Amanda Hurtado, poet, artist, scholar, and fearless researcher of poetics.
NH Pritchard was a fixture of the NYC neo-avant-garde poetry and art scene at the dawn of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. He studied at NYU + Columbia, taught at the New School for Social Research, and was central to the 1962 Umbra Writers Workshop. In a recently published 1978 interview at Jacket2, Pritchard details his time in New York among the abstract expressionist painters, New York School Poets, Jazz Musicians, and Umbra and Black Arts Poets. He cites Asian poets, the pre-Socratics, and Mallarmé as possibly his greatest influences, “namely for that fact that quote, the man was a philosopher…I met every major painter and poet in America. I can recall hours upon hours of rapping with de Kooning and Motherwell and Klein and Rothko and Guston. You know…rapping with Paul Blackburn and Oppenheier and Ginsberg and Frank O’hara…and still, during all those years, my own creative work was sequestered….it was a great learning process for me being with the giants…we knew that we were at the center of what was happening in the world…I’m involved with a revolution that’s going to change the form of the book. I’m not sufficiently satisfied with a poetic revolution….”
Along with The Matrix (Doubleday 1970), and Eeccchhooeess (New York University Press, 1971) he published in many journals in the 60s and early 70s, recorded his poetry on at least two vinyl collections (New Jazz Poets, 1967, and Destinations: Four Contemporary American Poets, 1966) and was collected in several anthologies, including Clarence Major’s The New Black Poetry (1969), In A Time of Revolution (1969, ed. Walter Lowenfels), Richard Kostelantez’ collection In Youth (1972), and the first volume of the Yardbird Reader, ed. Ishmael Reed, 1972.
Pritchard’s poems in the Yardbird Reader certify AL Nielsen’s assertion in Black Chant that “Creeley’s adage that form is never more than an extension of content has seldom been so tested by extension as in Pritchard’s texts.” Pritchard’s TRANSREALISTIC POEMS” (some of my favorite) inThe Matrix and in Eeccchhooeess push on the form/content distinction so hard (and the poem/image distinction as well) as to cause Kevin Young, in “Signs of Repression: N.H. Pritchard’s The Matrix” (1992, attached) to call Pritchard’s work “material poems.”
Aptly, then, on this episode we discuss N.H. Pritchard’s work alongside Craig Dworkin’s masterful materialist reading of N OCTUR N, a poem in The Matrix. Listeners familiar with Dworkin’s work will know that his materialist poetic readings of 20th and 21st ctry. avant-garde poetry and art in Reading the Illegible, No Medium, Radium of the Word, and Radical Lexicography have opened literary criticism to a new alterverse of critical post-schizophrene, post-paranoid, beyond reparative language engagement, positing in their constellatory, masterful, relational readings a world of language that both resists our final pinning of it because its excessive signification always exceeds our critical grasp, an excess that, paradoxically, also seems to appear right on the surface, in the material-semiotic interface, in places so obvious, like the blank space of the page delineating blocks of prose, as to be taken for granted. Dworkin’s writing on poetics transforms the work of criticism from an expository descriptive theoretical performative professorial practice into a Dedalian psychogeographic stroll through language’s labyrinthine productive onto-epistemology and aleatoric signification, a material universe we find just as loaded with meaning as the illocution we tend to reductively make our constatives about. Toeing the cruciform undecidable limits of a disoriented compass with one axis pointing to the present and the available, and another axis pointing at the unknown and unknowable, these books offer the intrepid reader a radical guided spelunking into the leaky hydrological plumbing of language’s transreal aqua-architectures, where each fluid chapter, and sometimes every dripping paragraph and dissolving sentence seems to present a new ‘pataphysical hadron particle collider-like sensor for impossible critical inquiry. And this doesn’t even mention his extensive body of poetry that echoically enacts this non-theoretical practice as a chthonic topological flip-side signal of what, I’m still trying to name. I will leave up to the readers to find Helicography, The Pinewoods Notebook, FACT, Strand, Dure, and the rest, wherever their bodies might intersect with them.
In the recently published Radium of the Word from U Chicago Press, Dworkin writes of “Pritchard’s affected style — grandiloquent and replete with anthropomorphized abstractions undertaking — concrete actions, nominalized adjectives, neologisms and archaisms. Dworkin provides a masterful reading of “N OCTUR N” from The Matrix, suggesting that”
“Pritchard’s poem calls attention to the relation between the visual and the linguistic, to what is seen and what is understood, to what – in short – is “red” and what is read. Or, alternately, the poem proposes the distance between what is read and what is heard. Quotation marks, visible but inaudible, originally indicated the transcription of speech, in which the difference between red and read cannot be heard but which must be resolved when rendered in print. Throughout his poetry, in fact, Pritchard experiments with print’s ability to make trouble and make noise, including a series of poems which Aldon Nielsen has nicely described as “ventilated” texts.”
N.H. Pritchard’s The Matrix and EECCHHOOEESS have recently been republished in the United States by Ugly Duckling Presse, Primary Information, and DABA Press, constituting an anti-canonical event par excellence, because these publications are meant, in part, to point out the serious critical lacuna in “the canon” (both poetic and critical) surrounding these incredible works of visually inflected poetry. Whether we can demonstrate the respectful interstanding with these texts that will ensure that their anti-canonical challenge retains its power is up to us, and the kind of engagement we allow these texts to make with us.
We are joined today by Amanda Hurtado, poet, scholar, and fearless researcher of poetics. Her work, S ACE P, published by Eclipse Editions is a literally retyping of Clark Coolidge’s SPACE. She typed the book on an IBM Selectric composer, and split the book in half, presenting only those letters typed by the left hand on the left side of each spread, and those typed by the right hand on the right, bringing to light a new rhythmic time-space only intuitively grasped by the reader of Coolidge’s original. She is also the author of CELL from MonoD Press and Moth Iverson, from Stolen Escaped. Her work has appeared in Timglaset, OEI, and ToCall. She is currently at work on a dissertation at University Colorado, Boulder on a poetics of the literal measure.
Other conversants are Simon Eales, Zack Brown, Courtlin Byrd and myself, Brent Cox.
https://jacket2.org/commentary/nh-pritchard
https://jacket2.org/article/transrealism-norman-pritchard
https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/10930/freedom-time
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo68659686.html