The Selected Poems of Steve Dalachinsky
Steve Dalachinsky author Michael Ruby editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:City Lights Books
Publishing:21st Jan '27
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 21st January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Poetry Books!
The first widely available, comprehensive selection of New York's consummate outsider and underground poet, spanning a lifetime of work.
"Steve Dalachinsky is a poet of the real world in a time when reality is despised, dismissed, not understood or lied about."—Amiri Baraka
"To write about the life of Steve Dalachinsky, one first has to decide what to call him. 'Poet' comes to mind, given all of his books of poetry, the poetry awards and the countless times he read his work, often accompanied by jazz musicians, in the avant-garde clubs of New York and environs. . . . And he could be called an omnipresent figure on the avant-garde scene, known in and around SoHo, where he lived, both for carrying forward the sensibility of the Beat generation and for nurturing new jazz talent."—New York Times obituary
As a Brooklyn-born teenager, Steve Dalachinsky (1946-2019) was committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he discovered contemporary poetry through copies of Ginsberg's Howl and Ferlinghetti's Coney Island. These experiences led to a life on the margins, constantly writing while selling LPs on the street, as his SoHo neighborhood became the art capital of the world. A well-known NY character, Dalachinsky seldom worked a conventional job, one of the last true bohemians in a city still struggling with affordability. Situating himself apart from modern movements—which he also drew upon to create his unique poetics—Dalachinsky remained unpublished for half his life, before being taken up by music aficionados from Germany and France. Nonetheless, his work remained fugitive, in small stapled chapbooks or expensive European editions without U.S. distribution. Several were written over 20 years or more, as he would obsessively write during free jazz shows by the likes of Charles Gayle and Cecil Taylor.
Selected Poems of Steve Dalachinsky is the first opportunity to see the range of this most individual poet. Divided into eight sections, it presents Dalachinsky's early and late poems, between which are substantial selections from his ongoing projects. The book also contains a biographical introduction by Michael Ruby and a foreword by Steve's wife Yuko Otomo, herself a poet and artist. From his so-called French poems (written on visits to perform in France), to his long engagement with ekphrasis, to his...
Praise for Steve Dalachinsky's Selected Poems:
"Every word in this book is alive with Dalachinsky's grouchy tender vulnerability. Nothing could be as good as looking into his eyes and hearing his voice again, but this book comes close."—Julien Poirier, author of Out of Print
"Steve Dalachinsky not only wrote poetry, he lived and breathed it. From his music poems to haiku to New York poems, this captivating collection is a testament of a life steeped in poetry and a devotion to all art forms and expression. Each poem reverberates a voice of incomparable depth, rawness, and honesty."—Marisol Limón Martínez, author of Via Dissimulata
"Who better writes about the 'i' than Dalachinsky? He examines, interrogates, accuses, pronounces, forgives, empathizes and laughs at the self via the poem. The Love poems are confessionals. The dexterity in the way he changes pace, rhythm and pitch on the page is like Bird changing keys during a solo. Nobody can employ a refrain to hypnotize like Steve Dalachinsky."—Tate Swindell, author of Solar Hits
"Dalachinsky is New York City's greatest poète maudit only he threw off the curse of madness & embraced the excesses & singularity of free jazz as well as art, low, high & everywhere in between to create a body of work that dovetails closely with his fellow travellers Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans & the irreducible Ornette Coleman. A poetry of sensation merging with cosmic ideas spilling from these pages onto your hands, Dalachinsky's poems are an essential handbook of what it is like to seek the sacred song of jazz in the embarcadero night while hawking records on the street by day & sweeping the steps by grey morning light. Steve's oeuvre connects us back to the Beats & the mystic revelations of William Blake."—Jeffrey Joe Nelson, author of Road of a Thousand Wonders
"In my way of seeing it, Steve doesn't fit into any neat category, academic or otherwise. And being an autodidact, his reality and art are a homemade reality and art. Steve in a certain way was always working on his language—taking impressions from all manner of phenomenon and mutating and fracturing that into his verse—and a lot of the pieces might have been spontaneous, but there was a method that was constantly refining itself and allowed him to create verse like that. Take each poem as it is; maybe Steve is beyond category."—Matthew Shipp, free-jazz pianist and author of Black Mystery Pianists and Other Writings
ISBN: 9780872869240
Dimensions: 228mm x 152mm x 12mm
Weight: unknown
250 pages