Dick Allen

This article is about the 20th-century American poet and critic. For the 20th-century Australian poet, see Richard James Allen.

Dick Allen. Courtesy Dick Allen.

Dick Allen (August 8, 1939 - December 26, 2017)) was an American poet, literary critic, and academic.

Life

Allen was born in Troy, New York. He grew up near the Adirondack Mountains in Round Lake, New York, near the Adirondack Mountains. He received a B.A. from Syracuse University and an M.A. from Brown University.

He taught creative writing and English literature at Wright State University 1964-1968, and then the University of Bridgeport. When he retired, he was the Charles A. Dana Endowed Chair Professor at Bridgeport.

He was co-editor of several anthologies of science fiction and science fiction criticism,He was one of the founders of the Expansive Poetry movement. His influences included Ralph Waldo Emerson, A.E. Housman, Ben Jonson, Robert Frost

His poems appeared in many literary magazines, including Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, Massachusetts Review, American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, The New Criterion, Ploughshares, and The Gettysburg Review.

Writing

Allen was a considered a founder of Expansive Poetry, a movement that includes New Formalism and New Narrative, As he has defined the genre: "Expansive Poetry is a narrative, dramatic and sometimes lyric poetry of the late 20th Century that conveys significant non-Confessional observations, thoughts and feelings about the world outside the Self and about the Self’s various relationships with this outer world. In carrying such content, it generally uses traditional rhyme and meter — sometimes loosened or roughened — incorporating natural speech patterns."

Recognition

He served a 5-year term as Poet Laureate of Connecticut from July 1, 2010 through June 30, 2015.

His book, Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic, was a finalist for the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

Awards

• Robert Frost Prize
• Pushcart Prize
• Poems included in:
  • The Best American Poetry volumes for 1991, 1994, 1998, 1999 and 2006
  • Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (1999)
• Poetry writing fellowships:
  • National Endowment for the Arts
  • Ingram Merrill Foundation

Publications

• Anon, and various Time Machine poems. New York: Delacorte, 1971.
• Regions With No Proper Names. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975.
• Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.
• Flight and Pursuit: Poems. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
• Ode to the Cold War: Poems new and selected. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 1997.
• The Day Before: New poems. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2003.
• Present Vanishing. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2008.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

CT Poet Laureate Dick Allen reads "The Horse Knows the Way"

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• "As If I Wasn't There"
• "The Weeks Before"
• "If You Get There before I Do" at the Academy of American Poets
• "The Lost Children", "Skeletonics for Poets and Others"
• "Poem for My 60th Birthday" and "Tone Poem In A Small Forest Clearing"
• "Elvis," "Rats"
• Dick Allen b. 1939 at the Poetry Foundation.
• Poetry Links

About

• Dick Allen Official Website
• "A Day in the Life of Dick Allen", Cortlandt Review