N.H. Pritchard.
Eecchhooeess.
New York: Daba Press; 2021.
Hardcover with dust jacket.
64 pages.
5.5" x 8".
Very good.
Dust jacket has minor edge wear and soiling to back.
An exacting facsimile of Umbra protagonist
Norman H. Pritchard’s long-rare 1971
collection of visually kinetic poetry
American poet Norman H. Pritchard’s second
and final book, EECCHHOOEESS was
originally published in 1971 by New York University Press.
Pritchard’s writing is visually and typographically unconventional.
His methodical arrangements of letters and words
disrupt optical flows and lexical cohesion,
modulating the speeds of reading and looking
by splitting, spacing and splicing linguistic objects.
His manipulation of text and codex resembles that
of concrete poetry and conceptual writing, traditions
from which literary history has mostly excluded him.
Pritchard also worked with sound, and
his dynamic readings—documented, among few other places,
on the album New Jazz Poets (Folkways Records, 1967)
—make themselves heard on the page.
EECCHHOOEESS exemplifies Pritchard’s formal
and conceptual sensibilities, and
provides an entryway into the work of a poet
whose scant writings have only recently achieved wider recognition.
DABA’s publication of EECCHHOOEESS is
unabridged and closely reproduces the design
of the original 1971 volume.
Norman H. Pritchard (1939–96) was affiliated with the Umbra group,
a predecessor to the Black Arts Movement.
He taught writing at the New School for Social Research
and published two books: The Matrix: Poems 1960–1970 (Doubleday, 1970)
and EECCHHOOEESS (New York University Press, 1971).
