Selected Poems of Steve Dalachinsky

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Situating himself apart from modern movements—which he also drew upon to create his unique poetics—Dalachinsky remained unpublished for half his life, before being taken up by music aficionados from Germany and France.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 best known jazz-oriented work, Selected Poems represents the achievement of a poet who rarely received his due during his lifetime.