CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/2/2021

Celebrate National Poetry Month with N.H. Pritchard's 'The Matrix'

Featured spreads are from The Matrix: Poems 1960–1970, Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse’s new facsimile edition of N.H. Pritchard’s classic but rare 224-page paperback collection of concrete poetry, first published by Doubleday in 1970. Fred Moten writes, “Here’s a truth to which the black experiment is especially foregiven: ‘words are ancillary to content.’ The converse is also true, indicating mutual aid and mutual trouble. When words and content get together, there’s enough room in the vast, infinitesimal blur not in between them for poetry to make its dispersive, displacing way. Pritchard loves that non-Euclidean neighborhood. He keeps bullet time there, after hours, in a club, which is an open cell, called The Matrix. Welcome to this ‘huge/entering’ of concrete breath—unprecedented, unsurpassed.”