The Radical Legacy of N.H. Pritchard’s Concrete Poetry

Concrete poetry begs us to consider that before writing forms a coherent articulation, it articulates itself as a geometric form, an inexorably visual shape on the page. Not only this: that shape may become the very thing that vitiates the coherence of the articulation, that undermines or undoes the legibility presupposed therein, exerting a mutinous pressure on reading that is strong enough to break the very edifice of lexical and syntactical representation.

Take the following examples from the oeuvre of the late 20^th-century Black concrete poet N. H. Pritchard, whose collages, poems and manuscript pages are presently the subject of the solo exhibition, ‘Boom!’, on display at Peter Freeman Inc. in New York. In several works – which can also be called poems, pages or provocations – single letters disperse and drift in the air of the page, resembling stars constellating galactic space (Untitled (does) and Untitled (O), both undated). Elsewhere, the unitary shape of a sentence is mutilated, cleaved apart, as if a knife has been taken to its words so as to generate new ones, which resemble discrete phonemes more than contiguous words: ‘it will not be known’becomes ‘itw il lno tbek now n’ (Hoom, undated). Elsewhere still, there emerges the shape of a solitary letter, a lone ‘O’, which appears like a perfect circle floating just beyond the middle of the page, where it becomes – all at once – an exercise in geometry, an experiment in typography and a meditation on the gestalt of infinitude and wholeness (Untitled (Love Peace/O), undated). 

Pritchard, who studied art history at New York University, is singular but relatively unsung among the figures involved in his milieu of Black avant-garde writing. (That said, his work is enjoying a bit of a resurgence in art, poetry and academic worlds alike: in addition to a steady stream of scholarship on his work, two of his books – The Matrix (1970) and EECCHHOOEESS (1971) – were reissued in 2021, and several of his poems were on view in the 2022 Whitney Biennial). In the early 1960s, he became closely associated with the Umbra poets – a group of young Black writers who met weekly on the Lower East Side at the height of the Black Arts Movement – but has remained a bit of a cult figure in comparison to the group’s more canonical poets like Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) and Ishmael Reed. 

One might argue that Pritchard’s marginality follows from his supposedly quieter political intonation, compared to his peers in the Black Arts Movement: language is not marshalled to represent or explicitly call for a revolutionary horizon, rather, language itself is subject to an  upheaval. In Pritchard’s poems, politics – that territory which shapes and is shaped through language – takes on a life born through the literal space of the voice. The sovereignty of the page, and indeed the power of the linguistic subject, explodes under the entropic forces and antagonisms animated by his obliteration of linguistic coherence, the breaks and cuts he inflicts on his words. Language re-emerges as a kind of cartography of utterance, charted through terrains of power. 

Such interventions are charged with particularly insurgent political motives in Pritchard’s work: as he disassembles the apparatus of language, he makes concrete the serial disruptions and disorderings that Blackness brings to bear on the contours of language. For example, in works like Untitled (Boom!) (undated), onomatopoeia seems to resonate with the kind of detonative music of Black speech and phonics, the percussive rhythms that incarnate a relationship between Black language and jazz. (Pritchard was a devotee of New Jazz and contributed to the 1967 New Jazz Poetscompilation.) In ‘“a lance to pierce the possible”: Reading N. H. Pritchard’, scholar Lillian-Yvonne Bertram has noted that Pritchard’s work requires a careful ‘sounding out that emphasize[s] the differences between what you see and what you hear, and how you hear what you see’. 

Not only are we asked to consider how Blackness intervenes on concrete poetry, but more specifically, how it harnesses a particular abstraction to do so. Viewing Pritchard’s work in a gallery context – as we are afforded in the presentation at Peter Freeman – renews the opportunity to view Black concrete poetry as an endeavour in visuality, and to re-negotiate Black language through the art-historical terrain of abstraction. Pritchard was friends with several abstract painters of his time, including Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman. We might think of these artists as doing something analogous to Pritchard: just as concrete poetry articulates its expressive power by means of the movement of language through space, so too abstract expressionism attends to the gestural movement of paint through that same void. Like the abstract expressionists, Pritchard engages a kind of gestural poetics that is shot through with the passion and influence of movement: a word’s meaning takes place in the lines of flight, in its whirls and ruptures, in the raw activity of its dance.

The questions that Pritchard’s work raises at the edge between visuality and language have recently been taken up again in the work of contemporary Black artists working in conceptual and abstract art. We can think of his work in alignment with a broader turn in contemporary Black art towards the aesthetics adjacent to concrete poetry. The most visible example might be Glenn Ligon, whose Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against A Sharp White Background) (1990) concretizes Zora Neale Hurston’s axiom on racialization through literally placing black letters against a white background and then gradually blurring the chromatic distinction between the two. Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s exercises in speculative diagramming mediate the scale, shape and spatial relationship between letters to evoke affective intensities played out therein. For example, in And Black? (2017), the artist repeats the titular words several times on the page and then stretches, glitches and turns the typeface upside-down: ‘black’ emerges not as a fixed lexical concept but rather in shapes that suggest the open indeterminacy of a question. The artist and writer JJJJJerome Ellis – whose very name is a concrete poem – makes poetry whose visual form mirrors the sound of the stutter. In all of their work, I think of Pritchard’s injunction to ignite ‘a revolution that’s going to change the form of the book’ (Interview with Judd Tully, 1978), to break up the hegemony of language through entering into the space of Black visuality. 

^{Main image: N. H. Pritchard, Untitled (A Golden Opportunity) (detail), no date, correction fluid, photocopy, and printed paper collage, 28 × 22 cm. Courtesy: Peter Freeman, Inc., New York/Paris; photograph: Justin Craun}