Poets and Friends Remember Steve Dalachinsky in Tribute at Art News
As we noted earlier this week, our friend, the Brooklyn-born Steve Dalachinsky—a poet, jazz-devotée, and part of New York's avant-garde fabric—died on Monday morning, just shy of 73. In this tribute at Art News, Fred Moten, David Grubbs, Jay Sanders, James Hoff, Julien Poirier (below), and others have contributed brief, loving remembrances:
Julien Poirier
Poet and a founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse
I lived up on 112th Street and Steve and Yuko lived down in SoHo. On the weekends we would make plans to get brunch. I always came downtown. Steve wouldn’t be up any earlier than 11 and neither would I, and one reason for this is that we’d probably stayed up all night talking to each other on the phone. We would hang up at 4 in the morning and then I would take the C train down and meet him and Yuko around noon at a French bistro where we’d eat a big brunch with lots of coffee. On the phone we talked about nothing but poetry, obsessively, like mechanics working in the dark, but at brunch we talked about friends, movies, books, the scene. Steve once told me that the hardest thing he’d ever had to learn was how to live with his disgust for the behavior of his fellow man, but he did it: learned to accept what angered him without ever capitulating to it. He despaired, sometimes loudly, but his despair was so raw that you saw it springing from love. His love for what he loved was fierce and it filled his poetry with specific, truly loved things. Steve was a true poet and the greatest friend a younger poet could have. When it was time to say goodbye and he and Yuko and I were huddling together out on the sidewalk, he would grab me by the ears and smack me on the lips with his whiskery lips: “I love you, lad.”
Read them all at Art News. Our thoughts are with Yuko and Steve's friends in this difficult time. He was, and is, so loved. And we know enough to say that he gave great hugs. A huge hug to you, Steve.
An excerpt from Nicole Peyrafitte's forthcoming short film, Things Fall Where They Lie, is in homage to Steve, with whom she traveled France. Watch here. A still from the excerpt is at top.