Please join the Department of History of Art for the guest lecture "Lyricism in the Concrete Poetry of Norman H. Pritchard" with Christopher Stackhouse. This event will take place in person, and will be held in the Journalism Building room 360 at 11:30 on April 14.
Please not that this event has been pushed back and now has a new date.
American poet Norman H. Pritchard (1939 -1996) is an under-known poet in the canon of Post-WWII avant-gardism. His writing straddles the cosmopolitan precincts of visual, sonic, and graphemic poetics, offering a nuanced expression of 1960’s/1970’s Black Arts movement progressivism. Pritchard’s experiments in literature challenge visual art’s stability and test its dependence on the fidelity and knowledge embedded in images, signa, and representational agreement. Contained in the only two volumes of his poetry published during his lifetime – The Matrix Poems: 1960-1970 (1970), and Eecchhooeess (1971) – are poems addressing love, nature, mortality, identity, and so critically, American literature and the era and scene which gave birth to and fueled his art. These expressive pursuits were underscored by a constant material manipulation of language and letter symbol. This lecture considers how Pritchard imparts a fast lyricism to the gloss of Concrete Poetry, a category he indulged and contested during his brief public writing career.
Christopher Stackhouse bio:
Christopher Stackhouse is a writer, artist, curator and teacher. He is author of a volume of poems Plural (Counterpath press). He is co-author of image/text collaboration Seismosis (1913 press), which features his drawings with text by writer/translator John Keene. His poetry, essays, interviews, exhibition and book reviews have been published in several literary journals and arts periodicals including Hambone; American Poet –The Journal of the Academy of American Poets; Pfeil Magazine; Modern Painters; Art in America; and The Brooklyn Rail. Recent publishing credits can be found in The Basquiat Reader: Writings, Interviews, and Critical Responses (University of California Press); and The Wayland Rudd Collection: Exploring Racial Imaginaries in Soviet Visual Culture (Ugly Duckling Presse/D.A.P). Stackhouse is an alum of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and a Cave Canem Fellow.