I am the featured author for the February 2017 issue of SETU:
Setu: A Bilingual Journal of Literature, Arts, and Culture (Pittsburgh, USA)
,
Edited by an international board of talented Hindi and English authors, poets, journalists and critics from across the globe, Setu is a monthly artistic journal. Setu focuses on diasporic writings and features most happening, cutting-edge works in Hindi and English.
Setu means a bridge in Sanskrit and many other Indic languages. Becoming a cross-cultural bridge for the world literature is one of the main objectives of Setu.
Setu English Edition :: Setu Hindi Edition
(Here’s the February issue webpage: http://www.setumag.com/2017/02/Author-David-Allen.html)
David Allen is a freelance writer and poet now living in Central Indiana. He is the poetry editor of the online Indiana Voice Journal and vicer president of the Poetry Society of Indiana . A native of Long Island, he is retired journalist, reporting for papers in Virginia, Indiana and the Far East, where he was a bureau chief for Stars and Stripes for 19 years on Guam and Okinawa, Japan. He was part of the “Eat Write Café and Traveling Poets Society” on Okinawa, doing open mic readings and publishing an E-zine. His poems and short stories have been published in several journals and he has two books of poetry, "The Story So Far," and "(more)," both available from Amazon.com and by e-mailing him at david@davidallen.nu. He has a blog, “Type Dancing,” at https://davidallenpoet.net, and is an active member of the Last Stanza Poetry Association in Elwood, Indiana.
Poetry: David Allen
 |
| David Allen |
A Lie
once upon a time,
i found the secret
to the truth
and,
to protect my sanity,
i smashed it
with a rock
and destroyed all trace
of the liar.
Taking the Trouble
I walked to your
back door last night
and saw two legs standing
where mine might have been.
I panicked, stepped backwards
down the stoop steps,
retreated to the side of the house
and plotted.
Then I knocked on your door.
“Are you coming?” I asked.
You were confused, drunk,
shaken by his visit —
but smiling.
“How are you?” I asked his beard.
“I’m coming from behind my mask,”
he said. “My ass,” I thought.
You said you’d be along
shortly.
I waited through the long night
for your scream
or a slamming door.
Checking Out
And then the door slammed
and he stood there
in the middle of the room
looking toward the finality,
as if he could see the tracers
of her striding angry,
furiously from him.
“F**k this!”
she had said,
and the shock
of those two ugly words
echoed inside his foggy brain,
already confused
and struggling
to make sense
of what had happened.
The coins and the change bowl
and paperbacks and pens
she had swept with an angry arm
off the top of the bookshelf
lay scattered on the floor.
In his hand he clutched
the orange she’d thrown
at his head.
“Is this it?” he wondered.
“Is it finally over?
Or is this some new torture,
the start of some new
chapter in this confusing mystery?”
Outside, an engine started and revved
and the peel of rubber
told him
another non-supporting
character had just exited
stage left.
Letter to Legolas – Fiction
Rabbit McKay
Book Review: ‘The Story So Far’ by David Allen
Poets are allowed to make lists to tell us their “Story So Far,” as long as it’s an interesting list. David Allen’s is and thus, so are his poems—a good life that makes a good read. American poets, in other countries, are sometimes chided for taking even little details from their lives and turning them into poetry. That’s a large part of the art that David Allen has mastered—solidly, happily in the American tradition.
Allen is not averse to autobiography, not needing that mask of fiction behind which so many artists hide. Of course that is true in his title poem which catalogs his personal journey. It is most poignant in poems such as “Requiem for My Father,” which recites a litany of pain and in so doing purges the past, leaving a “demon-less Dad.” He writes to atone for the fact that “I Never Wrote a Poem About My Mother,” creating a poem even more powerful because it celebrates a life that was so often bullied into a position of powerlessness.
Allen’s poems are a often a plain song in performance of a homey philosophy. For those who search for god, “In the Country” asks “if god/ is afraid of the dark.” In “No Sense,” we contemplate a god who “is either/ absent minded,/ a practical joker,/ or a sadist.” His “Meaning” is something you can “put…in your pocket…go off whistling/ down the street.”
“Anticipation,” delights us with music “like a cool chill on a steaming/ day of city summer stranger streets.” “Nightmares,” turns philosophy into a song, something Allen may have learned from his father who “plays the mandolin/ when life begins to close him in.” Allen even has moments one could liken to Emily Dickinson, as in “Underneath.”
The Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Louis Simpson, himself inclined to cataloging the oddities of “American Poetry,” has also noted that many poets seem to want to be novelists. Allen himself, in “The Final Chapter,” promises “No more novel, play or poem similes.” Luckily, he contradicts this pronouncement many times in this book. His relaxed lines and narrative tendencies might remind you of “novel.” In truth, he has a professional journalist’s talent for writing good lead lines, a poet’s ear for music and the strong endings of a story writer. Blending forms, he is a poet who more than gives us—he gifts us his life in poetry!
He explains his modus operandi in “Running” noting how writing has been his refuge and salvation even as “book walls crumbled/ and, crippled, I learned to crawl.” Indeed, he’s gone much further than that humble admission in the Story So Far. He puts a well-earned, positive slant on his accomplishments in “Seesaw Sensations,” exclaiming “Ah, so this is living.” Hooray for David Allen’s courage, creativity and poetry!
Type Dancing 