New and On View: Mudlark No. 48 (2012)
Little Songs
from The Blue Gazebo
by John Allman
His "Little Songs," John Allman says, are "sonnet-size poems," thirty-three of
them, "some indeed being sonnets," that taken together make up the second of
three parts of The Blue Gazebo, his ninth full-length collection of poems.
Born in 1935, and initially raised in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New
York City, John Allman, author of eight book-length collections of poetry, two
chapbooks, and a volume of short stories, was a high-school drop-out who earned
his diploma in night school while working as a lab tech for Pepsi-Cola.
Eventually turning away from science for the humanities, and knocking about in
many jobs, he earned degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing from
Hunter College and Syracuse University (where he worked with Delmore Schwartz
and Philip Booth), while becoming more and more involved in writing poetry.
At the age of 44, after some years of having his work appear in journals, he
published his first book, Walking Four Ways in the Wind (1979), with Princeton
University Press in its Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. His most recent
poetry collections are Loew's Triboro (2004), Lowcountry (2007), both from New
Directions, and Algorithms, prose poems (2012) from Quale Press. His Inhabited
World: New & Selected Poems 1970-1995 (1995) was published by the Wallace
Stevens Society Press. His recently completed collections, Older Than Our
Fathers and The Blue Gazebo, are making the rounds, looking for a publisher.
Allman has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a
Pushcart Prize in Poetry, and the Helen Bullis Prize from the original Poetry
Northwest. He earned his living teaching college English and retired from that
in 1997, to have more time for writing. He lives in Katonah, NY, with his wife,
Eileen, a Shakespeare and Jacobean Drama scholar and writer. They spend their
winters on Hilton Head Island, SC.
Spread the word. Far and wide,
William Slaughter
MUDLARK
An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics
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