Complexion & Complexity
we all have to live
somewhere
in my house
my work
the music
you live in
your house
the street
the music
give up the body
the sweet smell of citrus on the skin
the innocence of clementine
go restlessly into numbers
i go openly back
to the tree……….
He lives the music, and his poems capture its heat and illumination.
Francis Davis
Winner of the 2007 PEN Oakland National Book Award, The Final Nite & Other Poems, Complete Notes from a Charles Gayle Notebook 1987-2006 chronicles, in verse, nearly two decades of work written while listening to live performances by the musician Charles Gayle. Including every poem written under these circumstances, the poems reflect, respond to, or incorporate elements of Gayle’s music as well as his “speeches” and “sermons.”
Steve Dalachinsky (1946–2019) was a poet and collagist. His books included Fools Gold (New Feral Press), A Superintendent’s Eyes (Unbearable Books / Autonomedia), Flying Home (Paris Lit Up Press), The Invisible Ray (Overpass Press), Frozen Heatwave (Luna Bissonte Prods), Black Magic (New Feral Press), Where Night and Day Become One: The French Poems (Great Weather for Media), The Chicken Whisper (Positive Magnets Press), and the chapbook In Glorious Black and White (UDP). Dalachinsky received several awards in his lifetime, including the PEN Oakland National Book Award for his book The Final Nite (UDP), a 2014 Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and a 2015 Pushcart Prize nomination for his poem “Particle Fever.”
A poetic and moving documentation of an artist's art and its impact, written by one extraordinary man about another.
All About Jazz
Dalachinsky feels compelled not to capture and preserve these musical events, but rather to react to them and record his responses. He often follows the projected-verse/open-field writing technique of Charles Olson, which involves taking in everything in your field of vision, and experiencing stimuli through 'all six senses.'...Dalachinsky’s work also brings to mind the immediacy of Kerouac’s spontaneous prose. 'Poetry becomes like staves of music, writing within the musical realm,' Dalachinsky said. He often writes in glyphs, symbols that don’t resemble any written speech, as he’s listening to the music—his own private score. On the pages of Final Nite, words are strewn sparsely across the page in a seemingly random fashion—like the trailing notes at the end of an improvised solo.
Carol Wierzbicki, The Brooklyn Rail
Steve Dalachinsky is a poet of the real world in a time when reality is despised, dismissed, not understood or lied about.
Amiri Baraka
Other UDP titles from Steven Dalachinsky here
ISBN: 978-1-933254-15-9
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 248 pp, 6 x 8 in
Publication Date: January 01 2006
Distribution: SPD