Steve Dalachinsky

It was published by the New York-based publishing company Great Weather for Media, and was the Silver Award-Winner in the 31st Annual IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards in Poetry.

In his review of the book in Sensitive Skin, Valery Oisteanu wrote: "The free-wheeling Dalachinsky jumps easily from free verse to concrete poetry, from chaotic typography to whimsical designs, word constructions and deconstructions, puns, sound percussion ('tachada, tachada'), plays on names and words à la Duchamp or 'mailtrate de la langue a la Americane'".

The poems were written over 34 years and described by Oisteanu as, "a dream-like literary mindscape peppered with head-spinning references, using an erudite knowledge, ostentatious name-dropping and a post-beatnik morphistic narrative of rare synchronicity. A perfect collage of cut-ups; train-of-thought à la Allen Ginsberg; an awkwardly unsettling geography laced with hidden meaning".

Addressing a loved one, Dalachinsky writes:

Dalachinsky read throughout the New York City area including at the: Poetry Project, Vision Festival, ISSUE Project Room and the Knitting Factory.

and also read in San Francisco.

Abroad, he had read his works in Japan, Germany and England, where he read his Insomnia Poems, a collaboration with composer Pete Wyer for BBC Radio 3.

Steven Donald Dalachinsky (September 29, 1946 – September 16, 2019) was an American downtown New York City poet, active in the music, art, and free jazz scenes.

He wrote poetry for most of his life and read frequently at Michael Dorf's club the Knitting Factory, the Poetry Project and the Vision Festival, an Avant-jazz festival held annually on the Lower East Side of New York City.

Dalachinsky also read his works in Japan, France and Germany.

He collaborated with many musicians, writing liner notes for artists: William Parker, Susie Ibarra, Matthew Shipp, Joe McPhee, Nicola Hein, Dave Liebman, Roy Campbell, Daniel Carter, Joëlle Léandre, Kommissar Hjuler, Thurston Moore, Sabir Mateen, Jim O'Rourke, and Mat Maneri

Dalachinsky authored numerous books including a compendium of poetry written while listening to saxophonist Charles Gayle perform throughout New York City, and a collection of poems which focused on his time as a superintendent at an apartment building in Soho.

Along with pianist Matthew Shipp, he co-authored the book Logos and Language: A Post-Jazz Metaphorical Dialogue and collaborated with French photographer Jacques Bisceglia on Reaching Into The Unknown.

His spoken word albums include Incomplete Directions and a collaboration with Shipp on the album Phenomena of Interference.

Dalachinsky's works also appeared in several journals and anthologies as well.

Dalachinsky was born in 1946, Brooklyn, New York, "right after the last big war and has managed to survive lots of little wars", which is how he is frequently described.

He grew up in the Midwood section of the borough that was mostly an Italian and Jewish neighborhood with parents that were working class.

Dalachinsky said he was "always writing" at an early age and was also "involved in art".

His earliest notebooks of his writings that have survived go back to when he was between the ages of 13 and 15.

He was once kicked out of a Hebrew school because he was "wearing a cross", and hung out with the Italian kids in the neighborhood which "framed his perception of being Jewish", according to him.

Dalachinsky started taking art lessons at the Pratt Institute where for 18 months he first attempted his hand at painting, eventually turning to writing poetry full-time.

It was during this period in his life when he discovered beat poetry and found the poetry scene in Manhattan.

He was given copies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, which he says changed his style of writing.

Dalachinsky was also influenced by the writings of Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Ezra Pound, Delmore Schwartz, Federico Garcia Lorca, and William Blake, especially the work Auguries of Innocence by Blake.

Besides writers, he counted obsession, socio-political angst, human disappointment, jazz music and abstract visual art among his influences.

Dalachinsky related that writing process was as if "spontaneity mixed with a conscious pushing" and a "descriptive transformation".

His works have been portrayed as leaning towards "transforming the image rather than merely describing it".

For 19 years, starting in the 1980s, he wrote some of his poems while listening to live jazz music, going to free jazz saxophonist Charles Gayle's performances, creating poems on scraps of paper.

In 2006, Dalachinsky published a book of poems devoted entirely to Gayle, with the poems appearing chronologically in the order of the venues where Gayle performed at.

The collection was honored in 2007 with a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award.

The book is also unusual because not only is it documenting the music, but also Dalachinsky's state of mind at the precise moment of capturing a musical phrase.

Sometimes when Gayle's performance came with a sermon or lecture, commenting on topics like abortion or racial separatism, Dalachinsky would react with his poems reflecting the mood:

Dalachinsky also released a collection of poems, titled A Superintendent’s Eyes, ISBN 978-1-5702-7272-1, which focused on his time as a superintendent at a Spring Street apartment building in Soho.

It was published by The Unbearables, whom both him and his wife have a connection with, and describe themselves as a "loose collective of noir humorists, beer mystics, anarchists, neophobes and passionate debunkers".

In his 2013 review of the book, Alan Kaufman wrote: "It is the single most important volume of poetry to appear in the last ten years...he is the poet that America has been waiting for to free our national verse from its stratospheric sense of self-importance and return us to a poetry of flesh and heart, song and cement, just as Whitman's Leaves of Grass did in the nineteenth Century".

The poems were written over 20 years and described by Kaufman as, "ash can sonatas to lovemaking with wife, eating out in restaurants, illness, cancelled hopes, money worries, cash scores, tenant complaints, landlord humiliations and ruminations on drug addiction".

In one poem written while his wife was away in Japan, and he was relocating his writing space, he begins:

In 2018, Dalachinsky released his poetry collection Where Day and Night Become One: The French Poems: 1983-2017, ISBN 978-0-9981-4403-0, which assembled more than 30 years of writing journals from this trips to Paris.

He received the Franz Kafka Prize, Acker Award, PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award and was nominated for a 2015 Pushcart Prize.

He lived in Manhattan with his wife, painter and poet Yuko Otomo.