Steve Dalachinsky, Vorstoßen ins Unbekannte, Gedichten und Collagen
Publication, hrsg. von Jürgen Schneider
100 Exemplare, Hybriden Verlag, Berlin, 2021
Collagen von Steve Dalachinsky, CD: Steve Dalachinsky & Nicola Hein, Visual translations: Hans Verhaegen
About Steve Dalachinsky:
On 16 September 2019, poet Steve Dalachinsky, born in Brooklyn in 1946, died in Bay Shore, New York. He had been taken to hospital immediately after a reading in Long Island. He would have turned 75 on 29 September 2021.
Dalachinsky spent his life killing the nights "with music & mouthing", as his poem 'This is a Jazz Poem Not' says. He has worked with musicians including William Parker, Susie Ibarra, Matthew Shipp, Roy Campbell, Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen, Mat Maneri, Federico Ughi, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Rob Brown, Tim Barnes, Michael Evans, Thurston Moore (ex-Sonic Youth) and Nicola Hein. The spectrum of his performance art ranged from delicate whispers to wild and loud word cascades. In 2014, Dalachinsky was awarded the Order Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France for his poetry.
His numerous publications include the explicit jazz books The Final Nite, with poems written over more than twenty years as a listener to tenor saxophonist Charles Gay; Logos and Language, a collaboration with pianist Matthew Shipp that also includes poems dedicated to Shipp; The Mantis, a volume of poems spanning five decades for pianist Cecil Taylor; and the mammoth work Reaching Into The Unknown, written in collaboration with photographer Jacques Bisceglia. For a time, Dalachinsky was superintendent, i.e. caretaker, of the house in New York's Spring Street where he lived. His poems and prose pieces dedicated to this job and to the residents of the house can be found in the book The Unbearables: 'We Acted Completely Nuts'. An Anthology from New York (Zirl/Tyrol: Edition Baes, 2017).
