Circle In the Sand by Andrew James Pritchard

He demonstrated a strong interest in spiritualism and theosophy, and he might also be described as a nature poet, as many of his poems are set in bucolic surroundings. He was a member of the Umbra group, and after the group’s dissolution he was closely involved in the New York intermedia art, music, and film scenes in the late 1960s. Pritchard’s work, especially his later “transreal” writing, defies categorization: he is sometimes described as a concrete poet, but he could also be described as a sound poet, and he presented his poetry in conjunction with his own photography and even his own paintings. His work has enjoyed a recent revival, but much remains unknown about his life and work, and what follows here is only an introductory account of his late “transreal” writing, which is uniquely extreme in its ambitious attempt to transcend standard syntax, spelling, and discursive meaning. Norman Pritchard may have been the most formally innovative visual poet in New York City in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and yet he largely vanished from the literary scene after publishing two exceptional books, and did not publish at all for the last two decades of his life.

“Pritchard seems to have been profoundly and earnestly committed to a poetics of revelation as much as he was to a nonreferential self-cancelling poetics - and perhaps those two versions of nonsignification are not at odds with one another.” Above: pages from “Hoom, a short story.”

Circle In the Sand by Andrew James Pritchard