“EECCHHOOEESS”

"As Lillian-Yvonne Bertram writes perceptively, 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.” […] 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. Bertram’s description of the sonic and visual complexity of Pritchard’s work suggests, in part, why his work has proven so resistant to criticism. Pritchard was fascinated by the “very elements” of perception and representation, and to an uninitiated reader his poetry can seem at one extreme radically simplistic and, at the other, radically hermetic. Pritchard, who studied art history at NYU and Columbia, was keenly aware of the visual aspects of his work. His books must have been exceptionally challenging to design and publish in the predigital era, and Pritchard himself routinely hand-colored copies to give to friends and colleagues. One of the most unique visual characteristics of Pritchard’s books is the use of the entire space of the page, without any margins, often making the ink of the poems visible on the page edges. Many of Pritchard’s letterforms were hand drawn, and he often squeezed text even into the gutters of his books. In Pritchard’s second book, EECCHHOOEESS, nearly every aspect of the book is doubled or mirrored — from the letters in the title to the full pages of zeros and ones interspersed throughout. The book opens with the poem “FR / OG” (as its title is listed in the table of contents). For ten pages, “FR / OG” features a vertical column on each page, which consists of either “as” or “as a” and then intersperses other words to the right of each column (figure 1). In its seriality, the poem is onomatopoeic when read aloud, and it almost certainly recalls both the print version and the recording of Aram Saroyan’s single-column “crickets,” a poem that would have been nearly impossible for Pritchard not to have seen or heard. Frogs eat crickets, we might recall, even though Pritchard doesn’t ever directly mention Saroyan." —https://jacket2.org/article/transrealism-norman-pritchard