Lost Books Month: Guest Writer stevenallenmay Discusses The Poetry Of N.H. Pritchard

The Devil's Accountant is proud to present a guest writer for Lost Books Month. Poet & publisher, stevenallenmay of Plan B Press, has stopped by to share some thoughts on an author whose contributions to Concrete and LANGUAGE poetry have been recognized by the adept and yet whose writings are largely missing from bookstore and library shelves.

This is what Lost Books Month is about, people.

stevenallenmay is a talented poet and publisher and you would do well to familiarize yourself with his work. Something I've done before, much to my personal edification I might add.

The floor is yours, bard.

N.H. Pritchard's Books


My interest in Norman Howard Pritchard III is personal, I discovered books from his personal library at a recycling center in 2003. All signed by Pritchard, some with keepsakes and photos in them. I had no idea who Pritchard was. The more I researched the more I realized how little was known of his life after the appearance of his second book, and moreover, the less I understood what had happened to him.

Here was an Afro-American concrete poet who had managed, as so many previous authors had managed, to disappear from public awareness and whose books had fallen out of print. From 2003 to present, I have found a bit about the man and his books. His two books were published with a year of each other and there were no further collections of his work until his death.

His work appeared in Umbra and in several other journals throughout the 1960’s. With the release of these two books, however, his publishing career seems to have ended. It ended with two out of print books by a truly innovative and forgotten poet.


The Matrix Poems: 1960-1970 by N. H. Pritchard. Doubleday. 1970.

The Matrix is a collection of work encapsulating a decade. He demonstrates a range of poetry styles in these 203 pages, with much of the book taken over by Visual or Concrete Poetry forms. While some have suggested that Pritchard had adapted the spacing and typography of e e cummings, it could well be true that his visual component has more to do with musical notation (he did contribute pieces to two “spoken word” albums in the 1960’s, one can hear intentional repetition in – for example – his piece “Gyre's Galax”) . The book has a clear visual presence that is unexpected in a Doubleday published collection of poetry for the times. One has to wonder how successful the book was expected to be when the market for an Afro-American Concrete Poet seems precariously small.


EECCHHOOEESS. N. H. Pritchard. New York University Press. 1971.

EECCHHOOEESS is in a sense a continuation of the vispo efforts begun in his earlier book. While some of the work seems confined to the dimensions of the book itself, it’s evident that the author sees the physical book as something of an obstacle – the work expands beyond the page and beyond the edges of the book. In addition to his new non-linear, representation “language”, he shreds the English that he does use into extremely fragmented entities. Anticipating the use and abuse of language in the Computer age he could only imagine.
To say that he was ahead of his time is to be kind to his time. Not wholly accepted into any prevailing “group” or category seems to have further distanced him from those who might have gotten his work during his publishing lifetime. It ought not surprise one that the poet Charles Bernstein embraced Pritchard as a forefather of LANGUAGE poetry once he discovered his work, in 2005. He had not known of him prior!

These books along with whatever can be retrieved of his “uncollected works” need to be brought back to light, to make his work “unLOST”.

-stevenallenmay

Apparently some of Pritchard's contemporaries agree with stevenallenmay. You may recognize some of these names.