The New York Times on Steve Dalachinsky (1946–2019)

The New York Times remembers poet Steve Dalachinsky, who passed away unexpectedly last week at the age of 72. The internet has been awash with remembrances including these at Art News, Blank Forms, and WBGO, which we posted last week. At the Times, Neil Genzlinger writes that 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." More: 

So over what might have been his objections, he will here be called a poet. But he could also be called a jazz aficionado, one so knowledgeable that musicians enlisted him to write liner notes for their albums. Music critics said that if you saw him in the audience at a club, you knew you were about to hear some good music.

He could be called a collagist, whose artwork turned up in exhibitions. 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.

Mr. Dalachinsky was in his element on Sept. 14 at the Islip Art Museum on Long Island, where he gave a reading after having attended a concert by the Sun Ra Arkestra that afternoon in Manhattan. Not long after the reading, his wife said, he had a stroke and a cerebral hemorrhage. He died the next day at Southside Hospital in Bay Shore. He was 72.

“The whole avant scene — music, poetry, visual art — in New York City is going to change now because he’s not around,” the guitarist Loren Connors, one of many musicians who collaborated with Mr. Dalachinsky, said by email...

Continue at the NYT.