[1] Prior to his time with the Umbra Poetry Workshop, Pritchard was acquainted or became friends with many artists, writers, and poets in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, including Philip Guston, Bill Komodore, Reuben Kadish, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Paul Blackburn, and many others who would frequently meet at the Cedar Tavern near NYU.
[5] During the years he was a member of the Umbra poets, Pritchard's work appeared in magazines and journals such as Athanor, the East Village Other,[6] Gathering, Liberator,[6] Negro Digest, Poetry Northwest,[7] Sail, and Season.
[2] Though Pritchard's work received recognition during the late 1960s and early 1970s,[10] The Matrix and Eecchhooeess did not see significant success; as Richard Kostelanetz states, "Only one one-man collection of visual poetry, for instance, has ever been commercially published in the United States, even though 'concrete' is reportedly 'faddish'; and since that single book, N. H. Pritchard's The Matrix (1970), was neither reviewed nor touted, it seemed unlikely that any others would ever appear—another example of how the rule of precedent in literary commerce produces de facto censorship.
[10] In 1992, Kevin Young produced the first serious engagement with Pritchard's work in many years in a "groundbreaking"[14] essay for the Harvard Library Bulletin, offering theories as to why Pritchard's work might have fallen out of favor or proven inconvenient as "far too abstract for a largely white avant-garde trying to simplify and internationalize the poem by making it graphic" and "seem[ing] to fall outside the Black Aesthetic's vernacular and political aims.
[15][17][18][19] In 2014, Anthony Reed included a chapter on Pritchard, Terrance Hayes, and M. NourbeSe Philip in his work Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (JHU Press);[20] the book received the MLA's William Sanders Scarborough Prize.