But then I got less interested, and, by my senior year in high school, I knew I wanted to go into literature and writing. At Cornell, he eschewed the sciences to study English, writing short fiction in creative writing classes. I decided poetry would be a better medium. For 15 years he wrote only poetry and nonfiction, including a dissertation for his Ph.D. in English from Cornell. In 1977 he came South to teach at Furman University, where he's been ever since.
Most fiction writers look at language more like a window.
When you talk about getting lost in a book, you mean that at some point you're not aware of the language at all. And that involves skills of a different kind. With both sets of skills now in his repertoire, Allen began publishing his stories while continuing to work on his poems. Over the years, he has watched his poetry style change. As the years have gone by, I've gotten less interested in essences and more interested in elaborations.