Craft: N.H. Pritchard

N.H. Pritchard (Norman Henry, 1939-1996) was an experimental concrete poet and member of Umbra, a Black artists collective founded in 1962. Pritchard’s poetry used the text and the blank page in unexpected ways, expressing text-as-freedom, space-as-freedom, racial equality as concrete.  It is part of an Afrofuturist continuum including artists like Sun Ra, Funkadelic, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Anthony Braxton, and Rammellzee.

Pritchard studied Art History at NYU, then pursued graduate studies at Columbia. He published two books in his lifetime, The Matrix: Poems, 1960-1970 (Doubleday, 1970) and Eecchhooeess (New York University Press, 1971).

Pritchard, c. 1971 [photo by Larry Fink]

Pritchard’s poems are easier to replicate in the age of digital printing; in 1970, his experiments with text, font, and space were pyrotechnical.