2025 Theses Bachelor's

N. H. Pritchard and A Trans Method of Reading

Mason, Mira

My thesis examines the kerning poetry of Norman “N.H.” Pritchard, particularly his experiments with the spacing between letters in his first book, The Matrix. Pritchard is a little known black, visual poet most active in the 1960’s and 70’s. In the mid-60’s, he became extremely spiritual, developing a way of thinking he calls “transrealism.” This essay uses this term as an invitation to theorize a more robust trans method of reading using Pritchard’s poetry. Synthesizing archival material related to Pritchard’s spirituality and Laplanchean psychoanalysis, I conclude that Pritchard’s kerning poems enable readers to dramatically shift the way they conceptualize gender in and through language. By making non-gendered forms of language and non-essentialist constructions of gender more available and desirable to the reader, Pritchard’s poetry enables a novel and trans-feminist readerly method.