The Final Nite 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 is the author of In Glorious Black & White (UDP 2005) and contributed collages to The Race Poems (UDP 2004). He lives in New York City.

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Steve Dalachinsky is a poet of the real world in a time when reality is despised, dismissed, not understood or lied about.

—Amiri Baraka

Dalachinsky writes free jazz. He lives the music, and his poems capture its heat and illumination.

—Francis Davis
music & cultural critic at the Atlantic Monthly
and author of Bebop and Nothingness

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.” So a poem could result from any number of stimuli, from an art exhibit to a memory of a lost notebook:

i, padlocked & lost in my own
combination
like bone & broken lens
venture thru
the mem’ry of a thing & always find
blank spaces
hard choices
balled up attitudes
& always
disenchantment

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 in The Brooklyn Rail