The Matrix: Poems: 1960-1970

by N.H. Pritchard

N.H. Pritchard (born 1939) was one of the few black practitioners of the concrete poetry movement, and his book The Matrix is one of just a few books of concrete poetry to have been published by a major American publishing house. Originally published in 1970 by Doubleday, The Matrix was given little support in its time, and Pritchard’s work was largely ignored or passed over by the international concrete poetry movement. However, The Matrix remains a cherished item for fans of poetry due to its unique composition and difficult yet rewarding poetics. Forcing the reader to straddle the line between reading and viewing, The Matrix, features visual poems that predate the work of some of the Language poets, including words that are exploded into their individual letters and columns of text that ride the edge of the page.

Genres: Poetry

203 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Norman Henry Pritchard, or N. H. Pritchard 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.

Reviews

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible collection. I came to Pritchard via his second collection, EECCHHOOEESS, a slim but phenomenal (and highly addicting—I’ve now read it 5 times through in the less than two months I’ve owned a copy of it!) book containing some of the most radical and elaborate typographical experimentation I’ve seen in ages, which greatly excited me. But it wasn’t just the visual spectacle of his poems that struck me; rather, the quality of the words themselves mesmerized me. The work frequently begs to be read aloud and absolutely deserves to be, and so I did. Often. And I loved it.

Fast forward to the end of March and I’ve got his earlier, lengthier first collection, The Matrix, in my hands. I’m staring at the cover, holding my breath, hoping his earlier work measures up to my beloved EECCHHOOEESS but also fully expecting it not to be. I made my peace with that possibility, was fully prepared to enjoy it on its own, possibly lesser, terms.

I opened the book slowly, started reading. I smiled. I was relieved. My worry was unfounded and entirely unnecessary. Indeed, I found The Matrix to be every bit as incredible as it’s follow-up, maybe even more so due to the wide variety of styles it encompasses. Extreme typography/layout workouts bump up against conventional structure, irregular and regular syntax coexist and frequently collide and elegantly mingle. It’s extremely invigorating to read this stuff. There is an exuberant energy throughout. Pritchard just makes me smile. Even when he’s somber, the work is so gorgeous when recited that I can’t help but find myself grinning by the end of a poem.

Highlights for me were the three epics, “N OCTURN E,” “AURORA” and “L’OEIL,” and among the shorter works “ASWELAY,” “DESIGN,” “THE OWN,” “THE HARKENING,” “EPILOGUE,” and “THE NARROW PATH” were also particularly stunning.

I can’t recommend this book, this poet, highly enough. N.H. Pritchard deserves a much wider readership and you owe it to yourself to pick up these gorgeous (and affordable) reprints from DABA Press and Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Press while you can.

In summation: if you enjoy poetry and you’re sleeping on Pritchard, you’re fucking up. Five stars. Get it in your life.

[Tentatively, Convenience]

review of
N. H. Pritchard's The Matrix Poems: 1960-1970
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 8, 2015

I'm usually on the look-out for poetry w/ imaginative typography, for poetry that isn't just just constructed of parallel lines in stanzas, for poetry that uses placement as part of its vocabulary. Hence my interest in Concrete Poetry & Visual Poetry. Furthermore, I'm interested in poets whose work isn't supported by the status quo, often b/c of suppression of content &/or b/c of isolation from an economic mainstream, often b/c of classism & racism. Hence I search for work on small presses that may present unusual &/or unpopular &/or minority viewpoints.

N. H. Pritchard is a black poet, The Matrix Poems uses placement as a major part of its vocabulary, a most unusual combination. According to Richard Kostelanetz's "Why Assembling" (1973) "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." ( http://www.richardkostelanetz.com/exa... )

Kostelanetz is certainly an expert on the subject, more so than me, but I still feel the critical 'need' to differ from him here: I don't categorize these poems as either Visual Poetry or as Concrete Poetry. I think of Visual Poetry as poetry in wch basic elements usually associated w/ language in its most conventional sense, letters & words, are repurposed as primarily visual elements w/o necessarily referencing their defined semantic content. Instead, the more 'expanded' semantic content may be referenced: letters seen as evocative gestures, eg. For me, Visual Poetry, even when it uses the defined semantic content of words, may not be using the visual presentation of sd content to embody it but may, instead, be incorporating words into a pictorial situation where they're 'matter' to be mixed into a more generally imagistic collage. See the Anthology Spidertangle (2009) for an excellent selection of such work (my review's here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62... ).

Concrete Poetry, on the other hand, for me, is poetry in wch the visual appearance reinforces the defined semantic content w/ other visual elements irrelevant to this purpose not present. Take, eg, Aram Saroyan's simple example: "eyeye" in wch the word "eye" is doubled & conjoined to evoke the more usual 2 eyes of the reader. These distinctions are hardly hard & fast, they're ones I make that others will no doubt disagree w/.

For me, Pritchard's Matrix Poems don't seem to use the placement of elements either for primarily imagistic purposes or to 'flesh out' the definitions. His poems, while they're certainly more visually inventive than the conventional stanzas of parallel lines evenly spaced, strike me as more 'conceptually' ponderously placed, as mostly designed to prompt a path for the reader's eyes, to complicate the reading experience by making the words more present as objects but w/o heightening their defined semantic content in the process or making them primarily visual & ignoring or downplaying their defined semantic content. As such, while Pritchard cd certainly be lumped in w/ Concrete & Visual Poets, I find him to be somewhat in his own category.

The previous publication credits interest me. I'd like to see the original places to see what the other work w/in them is like in contrast. I suspect that Pritchard dramatically stands out: "Umbra #2, #3, #4; Athanor; The New Black Poetry, edited by Clarence Major".

The epigraph that precedes the table of contents in Matrix Poems is a quote from Pritchard himself: "Words are ancillary to content." The implication, as I read it, is that words aren't necessarily the primary carrier of content but are a part of a larger support system. In speech, body language would also be ancillary to content. Pritchard's use of positioning seems to be the main other half of what produces the content.

There's a formal strategy at work in wch "o"s in various sizes appear - mainly, but not entirely, as graphic elements on their own, like brackets. The 1st poem is called "WREATH" & consists entirely of an "O". That cd easily enuf be called "concrete" or a Picture Poem. The poem beginning on p 191 is called "O" as is the very last one. For those of us inclined to pay attn to detail, it's noteworthy that in the Contents the title listed for 191 looks like a lower-case "o" whereas on p 191 itself it looks upper-case "O". Again, in the Contents, the title of the last poem seems to be an upper-case "O" while on the page itself it looks more like a circle, round rather than ovoid. I don't see a typesetting credit so I imagine Pritchard chose the fonts himself. The "O" motif also appears on pp 17, 44 (marking the beginning of Pt II), 50, 68, 78, 86, 125, 126 (marking the end of Pt II), 138, & 185. Most of the time, they're circles. Circles are (perhaps, all-too-) easily read as symbols of tautological & regenerative completeness, as holistic. I prefer to just see them as a recurring visual element here - thusly, perhaps, making them akin to Visual Poetry.

Much of the poetry strikes me as evocative of leisurely, relaxed days spent in pleasant environments. Perhaps the closest poet I can compare him to is Ian Hamilton Finlay. One of the main techniques Pritchard uses is spacing between subunits of words:

"W here quiet ly on ly go e s" - p 3

What Pritchard's intention was, I don't know. The effect is multiple: it makes reading more difficult, it slows the reader, it makes the reader look at the words differently. "Where" becomes "W" + "here". In a sense it becomes 3 words: "W", "here", & "Where" (or a letter & 2 words if one doesn't want to accept "W" as a word).

"OLOGY" (p 8) goes a bit further in its placement-as-direction-of-the-eye insofar as there's a left column that spells out "a / see / d / r" downward wch then has the "r" continue on to become "r / i / s / e / s:" in an upward diagonal - w/ the "s:" being the top of the right column. This right column then descends thru "s: / to / gather / nes / t". The whole can be read as evocative of a bird picking a seed off the ground & flying w/ it to its nest. Again, it's close to a picture poem but the placement is more exploitative of a process than it is an image, it's time-based.

A similar semi-concreteness characterizes "AGON" wch has the poem upside-down starting at the bottom of the page w/ the title right-side-up at the top:

"b low C oo p e r Sq u are
the fun era r y late n e s s" - p 8

There's some ambiguity: "b low" can be "blow" or "below". Hence we have "below/blow Cooper Square the funerary lateness". Cooper Square being an area in NYC the poem's inversion makes me think of its being underground there, perhaps bodies buried, perhaps a burial ground not too different from the one not so far away uncovered decades later than this bk in October 1991 & memorialized as the "African Burial Ground National Monument".

This technique of spaces w/in words seems to be Pritchard's most common one. In "the own" (pp 53-55) the ambiguity of "blow/below" is both expanded & contracted: "an d a t he l as t" is difficult to resolve b/c the isolated "t" can be both part of "at" & of "the" but the "the" is syntactically odd whether it's "the" or "he". In other words, the pieces can be conjoined thusly: "and at the last" wch requires having the "t" do double-duty but the typical phrase of "and at last" is disrupted by the "the" or "he". The next line, tho, somewhat resolves this w/ " t he f irst is n ear" or "the first is near" making the "the" of "the last" more in keeping w/ the patter/n of " and at the last / the first is near". In the same poem, the phonetic abbreviation of "b" for "be" is less ambiguous in "b not shaken by the pat h" insofar as "bnot" is not a word but "be not" is semantically conventional.

"THE HARKENING" is another 'separation poem' (to, perhaps, coin a term) where slight irregularities make the reading process a little more 'bouncy':

"da dirt h o fsh all
sha ll we" - p 69

"da" instead of the or, perhaps, as a variant on "pa" or "daddy" cd make the beginning of this brief excerpt be "daddy dirt" similar to "mother earth" but the following "h" is more likely to conjoin in readers's minds as "dirth", a phonetic equivalent to or common misspelling of "dearth" - yielding "the dearth of shall". "shall" occurs twice: 1st broken into "fsh all", 2nd broken into "sha ll". The 1st combination has "fsh" wch can easily be read as "fish". SO, alternate reading: "daddy dirt fish all, shall we". This, however, is taken out of context by me here & a fuller reading might produce different or clearer results.

"GYRE'S GALAX" (pp 46-49) gets into quasi-permutational territory reminiscent of Brion Gysin from roughly the same time in Paris but not as systematic. I imagine it read aloud:

"Sound variegated through beneath lit
Sound variegated through beneath lit
through sound beneath variegated lit
sound variegated through beneath lit"

"VISITARY" (pp 64-67) functions similarly w/ stanzas like this:

"Where winged wings
Where winged wings
Where winged wings
Where winged wings
Where winged wings walk
Where winged wings walk
Where winged wings
Where winged wings walk
Where winged wings
Where winged wings
Dewinged wings
Dewinged wings
Wings dewinged
Dewinged wings
wings dewinged
wings dewinged
dewinged wings
wings dewinged
dewinged wings
dewinged wings" - p 65

As I wrote earlier, "Much of the poetry strikes me as evocative of leisurely, relaxed days spent in pleasant environments." "THE NARROW PATH" (p 74) is an unusually straight-forward example:

"Very due that being each one dwells
through errant woods of stone
and roaming unknown streams
where few prints mark the air
contested only by that dare
and the narrow path
bending
but
to
where"

"AURORA" (pp 87-124) is, perhaps, the most adventurous in the path it creates for the reader. The 1st page starts w/ "There", down a space diagonally right, "are", down a space diagonally right, "only", down a space diagonally right, "pebbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb" & the "b"s continue on at the same roughly middle-of-the-page position onto the next page & on to the next where the word is finished at the right margin w/ "bles". The next 2 pages both have "NOW" placed in their center, the next pages after that have a similar centering but of, 1st, "NO", 2nd, "w". As such "NOW" transforms into "NO" - ie" "NOW" w/ "no w". From there, the trip becomes considerably more complicated by a variety of placements & hummings. This wd be a great one to be read aloud in an attempt to honor the layout as notation - perhaps w/ multiple voices.

Beginning the section titled "III Objects 1968-1970" the poems do become more 'concrete' but, again, less for the purpose of semantic amplification than I usually associate w/ Concrete Poetry. EG: the 1st poem is a capital "A" made out of capital "Z"s. It's very neat, I'm reminded of later work by Karl Kempton. It cd be read as an encapsulation of an alphabet: A to Z.

All in all, I find Pritchard's work to be very sparse & very original. I'm not moved by it in an emotional sense, I'm moved by it in a physical sense. Take the 1st 4 lines of """ (p 187):

" " " " "
" " " red "
" " " " " " red " "
" " " " red " " " red"

I'm sure that the neat columns won't display correctly on GoodReads. The quotation marks ("""s) can be re(a)d as "ditto". The 1st line of "ditto"s can be read as dittoing the title. The reader is seeing "red", an expression meaning "being angry" - but the reader is also just reading, the reader has read "red", has re(a)d. What Pritchard means by this is somewhat opaque to me but it definitely seems symptomatic of an active mind encouraging an active reading. Thank you, Doubleday & Company, for having the audacity to publish this.

[Lee Bullitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

My mind is SPINNING. Probably one of the most interesting, inspired poetry I’ve ever seen or read. I wish I had studied this mans work.

[alex kapsidelis · Rating 5 out of 5]

il i kedt his bo ok
no tew orthyt ore ad
high lyre c co mend

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Con crete poe try i s we ir d.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published by Doubleday in 1970, The Matrix quickly slipped away from attention despite its visual and linguistic vangardism that remains as relevant and challenging today. Mixing the elements of concrete poetry with the mantra to “make it new,” Pritchard’s often poetry forces readers to slow down to re-create and re-enact the act of imposing meaning on imagination:

ecro ache d di stance
str etches o ftim e
u nre ad able
f ort hem isten velop es
wh ere
b eeps b eat
dark
emer gence
ofg host lyfi gure
inhe avy c oat edol d
k n ow in g
not hing

Pritchard forces the reader to consider the material of poetry—the words and paper it’s on, the negative and positive spaces—in conjunction with the semantics of word and vision and how we understand taking apart and reassembling human sensual and intellectual affirmation.

[Brianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Xtended divinations made in stubborn light. Content married to form. Form as vision. The fixations of poets are very rarely boring.

[Teddy Farias · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's quite something! Very unconventional! Very original!

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

WINDSCAPE
Seemingly a gale came
hidden as it slipped
tripping about the dim
or a mountain in a flame
or a mountain in a flame
or a mountain in a flame
or a mountain in a flame
or a mountain in a flame
or a mountain in a flame
or a fountain in the rain
or a fountain in the rain
or a fountain in the rain
or a fountain in the rain
or a fountain in the rain
or a fountain in the rain
or a fountain in the rain
or a fountain in the rain
or a fountain in the rain
or a fountain in the rain
or a fountain in the rain
or a fountain in the rain (5)

ASWELAY
Weary was when coming on a stream
in hidden mist the amber adornment
of fall’s birth
here near edge
a rippling soundless
leaves and eddy eyes
with trickling forest thighs
in widening
youthful nippling
scenic creakless
In this boundless vastly
hours wait
in gateless
isn’t
fleshly
smelling
muchly
as a golden
On the crustish underbrush
of where no one walked
were
unwindish rustlings
musting thoughts
of ill timed harvests
And
as we lay
as we lay
and
as we lay
we lay
as we lay
and
aswelay
Above
a bird
watching
we knew not
what
cause
his
course
of course
we lay
we lay
in the rippling
soundless
boundless
vastly
of a firthing
duty leaving
welay
wanting
noughtless
And
then
it
seemed
as from the air
he
left
the
bird
who
watched
what would be called
a
dream (14)

AUTUMNAL
august falling
leaves
grounded thoughts
a montage over-exposed
a collage
of
bucolic silences (35)

[Taylor Napolsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, experimental work that is more focused on form and words than content…I love work like this, as I get as much out of viewing poetry as art, mood and image as I do from narrative terms.

It came out in 1970 but it vibrates strongly today. It’s also a fast read because many of the pages are nearly blank: words along the edges of the pages; blocks of text that insist we remember that letters are mere symbols which we give meaning to.

[DéShawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

good god. if this isn’t a poet’s poet favorite poetry book! if this isn’t bending over into the furthest reaches of what poetry and language can be is becoming. i don’t know what is! fucking brilliant. can’t believe i’ve never come across Pritchard until now. especially with being as big as a Baraka (Pritchard’s fellow Umbra poet) appreciator as i am! i need more of it. wow. oh. wow.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

extremely challenging and rewarding to read. reminded me of trying to learn how to read arabic. probably like jazz as well, but i have no knowledge to base this off of.

[Kurt Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The way Norman manages to make word art out of word art with tremendous meaning is awe inspiring.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the full text here: http://eclipsearchive.org/projects/MATRIX/matrix.html

[Gabriel Infierno · Rating 3 out of 5]

very cool book!

[Chaserrrr · Rating 5 out of 5]

“would the meek vent/ squeeze a beef’s leaf”

@
w……….b..…….w
ouo
ZZZ
ooooooOoooooo
ll
&&

[Wesley Harden · Rating 5 out of 5]

A complete rewiring of language perceptions. Both circumventing and circumnavigating the quiddity of language simultaneously.

[Mikael · Rating 5 out of 5]

THEM at Rix
Poe Ms Pritc

HARD

[maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow

[Bren · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of maybe five books of american poetry from the sixties actually worth anything. legitimately spectacular

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the most challenging poems I've read. Overall this is an exquisite book, and so fascinating as it forces the reader to accept a new, basically seraphic mind pattern. Pritchard was part of the Umbra collective, which I hadn't heard of before.

[Jason Ly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Experimental and visually stimulating, The Matrix is a fun exploration of form, concrete poetry, and language itself. Many of the poems are difficult to read purposely such as in the ones where words are broken down into fragments and you must puzzle out the correct way to read the word in the middle of reading through the text. I definitely appreciate this different approach, but it is also a bit annoying lol. I really enjoyed the experiments with text on the page, the use of repetition and having text trail off into the margins.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this thinking it was going to be a science fiction book, but it was kind of a lame occult book. Oh well...

[Güel Almeréida · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful