'a lance to pierce the possible': Reading N. H. Pritchard

I would like to shift away from discussing the deployment of whiteness in conceptual, avant-garde, or experimental writing. In my previous post, "Canvases Pale," I included a definition of conceptual poetics that links it specifically to the 21st century. Similarly, the definition in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics emphasizes the mechanistic mode of reproduction in these poetics, aided largely by the Internet and various means of digital production. But such technologies of writing in the formulation of poetics and aesthetics are not 21st century developments. I’d like to not be so hasty or short-sighted on the matter, and look at some work by N.H. Pritchard. As Kenneth Goldsmith has so keenly shown, various ways of manipulating text objects (words, sentences, sentence placement) do affect the reading and meaning-making of a particular text. I would like to glance at sections of the poem “Metagnomy” from Pritchard’s 1971 collection The Matrix: Poems, 1960-1970.

One striking feature of the poem is the deployment of kerning, the typographic process of “adjusting the space between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result” (Wikipedia). In his era, however, texts would have required physical typesetting in order to print and so I feel that an acknowledgement of the physical process and labor of his designs is required. This likely required more than a keystroke commitment. The capture below, taken from the poem “Harbor,” illustrates this technique:

I will not focus on “Harbor,” but this example shows how Pritchard buries more traditional images of nature (dusk, dawn, tides) in the psychovisual text and how these images are constructed and revealed through a deliberately delayed reading process of repacking the unpacked words. In “Metagnomy,” Pritchard draws on themes of nature in the images of birds and wind (“s ee m in g ly/as if a bird in f light” and “in t he w in d s w o n t”). However the poem is preoccupied not as much with the place or location of these images (the place of the poem isn’t exactly a physical one, rather it is “A mid the non com mit t e d/com pound s of t he m in d”) as it is with how, in emphasizing the constructedness of language, our attention is drawn to the ways that these constructions themselves build the image of pastoral beauty. That is, nature has no beauty-qua-beauty independent of how language describes it. The deliberately higher-pitched poetic register of the line “unto the sylvan down of wombs” (“un to t sylvan d own of w om b s”) concretizes the way language, already at least one remove from experience, combines with the expressive desire to abstract the self away from the more-than-human world in the process of trying to approach it more concretely. Language systems, Pritchard seems to suggest, much less traditional modes of writing and presenting text, are just not adequate to the task of developing a subjectivity that can understand the more-than-human elements of the world.

Instead, the poem proposes that by peering through the holes in language we can see the subconscious at work. It is through the activities of the mind that metagnomy, in the power of divination, can approach the mysterious. In this way the prospects of mental divination and access to aspects of the more-than-human world through extrasensory mental perception are assessed through the peeling apart of the words, revealing that the changed course of “a bird in f light” (line 9) is indeed “s ee m in g l y” (line 8). That is, what we perceive as a change in the course of a bird in flight might simply be the course the bird was always on. Similarly, the “w or d/f or got ten/in t he w in d ’ s w on t,” recalls the idea of a voice or words lost in the wind and suggests that words are not lost or forgotten as they are being carried on a different stream.

The poem does not negotiate between the more-than-human world and the world of the human, but is a negotiation with the mental self. The human subject must negotiate the openness and discomfort with the very openness supplied by the linguistic ambiguity the unclosed words suggest. As in many aspects of divination practices, one must first be open to the messages of the more-than-human world in order to access the fact that the mysteries of the mind and the natural world are the same and that there is no opposition. This is different from healing a rift or recapturing innocence, a la the poetics of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and to a lesser extent, Blake and Clare, but a statement as to the artificiality of the rift in the first place. For Pritchard, neither the mind or the text are screens against which the scenes of memory are played and replayed, allowing for a return to a pre-lapsarian childlike pastoral innocence; but the mind is a hem, a mist (both “hem” and “mist” come ghosting through the line “thru a c he mist r y of ought”—and how easy it is to read that as “chemistry of thought”!), an “age-less” (or “age less”?) gleaming. Or is it an “image less gleaming” or “imageless gleaming”:

Operating rhizomatically with its multiple entry points and replete with traces, there is no way to “tell” a definitive reading and the form-as-content actively resists such closure. The potential meanings are increased by the typographical maneuverings. In Pritchard’s poetics, the signifier is always at play in an unstable hovering. The mind is reasserted as a sensory organ that, with the attention required by “man if est s t a s i s” (a very difficult image to picture) to “r ide on ly up on t h at move ment t he ear t h pro vide s” (or is it “t he ear th” provides?) can lead to the profoundly natural and intrinsic sixth sense of seeing through the word tracings to the workings of the world that inspire them. Pritchard’s formal choices reflect the avant-garde aesthetic in the ways we might know the avant-garde as avant-garde (in its more traditional sense), as radical breaks with conventional forms and the conscious disruption of the status quo of what it means to “read” a text. He is perhaps doubly othered (and written out of literary history) not just by his avant-garde techniques, but also the way these techniques are deployed in an investigation of place and the natural world. What to make of such a poet who, at the time, was “out there” formally and stylistically in the service of exploring the more-than-human world? For those tempted to read Pritchard’s supposedly racially unmarked poetics as post-racial (or prefiguring the pleasant fiction of the post-racial) or as transcending race, such claims are hard to justify. While his choice of poetics acknowledge the way earlier African-American writers opened spaces for a greater variety of poetic forms and choices for content, poems like “Self” (“What does the cracker/when in a barrel/bare/with dark/and alone/and/beside it/self/with fear/of being/uneaten”) use the tropes of darkness and the slang meanings of “cracker” to direct attention, if obliquely, to constructions of race and particularly those constructions of whiteness.

I would be remiss if I did not point out the extent to which, in a first draft, my transcription of the lines (without the spaces) were an unnecessary violence occasioned by my efforts to “make legible” or “naturalize” the lines for the benefit (and detriment) of those who might not have the text on hand. Perhaps because they reveal one of the more readily accessible images in Pritchard’s work, the lines

not only suggest potential motives behind Pritchard’s psychovisual form, but the “pier” in “pierce,” a pier as a lance (the long line itself a piercing lance) piercing the landscape of a lake or an ocean, becomes extremely hard to ignore. What’s more, we are asked to consider the way the constructedness of the pier, a piece of built environment, seeks to pierce and enter (with deliberate phallic undertones) the more-than-human world. The textual kerning unlocks an image and its associated web of connotations that were previously hidden in the closed graphemes. A pier is an incursion, yes, but it can also be read as a radical (if misguided) attempt at closeness. That I originally attempted to “naturalize” Pritchard’s lines is a move that matters, not only because the form reflects Pritchard’s purposeful rhetorical and visual choice, but also because such a move at least partly obscures what I read as the orality of the text. If language can be partly interpreted as an attempt at foisting order on a disorderly world (or whose order eludes our current understanding), then the form worries the orderliness of language, and also worries the orderliness of reading expectations. Langston Hughes noted, when not selecting Pritchard’s work for inclusion in the 1964 anthology New Negro Poets U.S.A., that he returned manuscripts that were “so beautifully typed I hated to send them back—particularly Norman Pritchard’s (who sounds better than he reads in type…)” (Nielsen 42). Such an assertion might hold if reading were considered a de-facto silent activity. I argue that no attempt to “read” Pritchard’s texts can be fully satisfactory or representative without experiencing its sounds. While Pritchard does not write in what would have then been considered the African-American dialect or Black English that, at the height of the Black Arts Movement and Black Power, would have been in heavy circulation by a good number of African-American writers, there is a case to be made for Pritchard (like Chesnutt) graphically representing the words as they sound, as in his use of “thru,” “ajourn,” and “accuring.” The latter two words are not “real” words, but one can imagine an accent that elides the “d” of “adjourn” and accounts for “accuring” as a set of elided sounds in a portmanteau. (Or, they are very productive typos.) My own experience of reading the text was agonizingly slow, a process of reading and sounding out that emphasized the differences between what you see and what you hear, and how you hear what you see. It is also a process that involves the reader in speaking into existence the very elements that are at play—the earth, or an ear, for example. The first line of the last stanza likewise calls the reader to “E n chant m e n t s” (emphasis added), to the practice of chanting as a way of enchanting, a mode of spellmaking and conjuring not unfamiliar to the long history of African-American literary traditions. The chant is a means to get at “the abysses of a m i n d”, to speak them into being and thus inhabit the interstices and slippages of the subconscious-in-the-making. The openings in the graphemes invite the reader to participate in this experience.

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Notes:

There is little publicly available information about Pritchard himself. To read The Matrix, visit his page on the Eclipse archive.

References:

Nielsen, A. (1997). Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pritchard, N. H. (1970). The Matrix: Poems 1960-1970. New York: Doubleday.