Dick Allen, A Connecticut Poet Laureate, Dies At 78

Dick Allen of Trumbull, a poet, essayist and educator who was poet laureate of Connecticut from 2010 to 2015, died Tuesday after suffering a heart attack on Christmas, his daughter announced on Facebook.

He was 78. He died at around 3:30 p.m. at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport, Tanya Allen said.

“There was no pain, and there was a palpable feeling of peace in the room when he passed over,” Tanya Allen wrote in her Facebook post. “By chance a Buddhist-Catholic priest was in the hospital to say prayers over him with Mom and myself … which would have amused and hopefully pleased my father, as he was known as a Buddhist/Christian poet.”

Richard Stanley Allen was born Aug. 8, 1939, in Troy, N.Y., and grew up in Round Lake, N.Y. He received a bachelor’s degree at Syracuse University and a master’s at Brown.

His was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for “Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic,” won the New Criterion Poetry Prize for “Shadowy Place” and won the Connecticut Book Award for “Present Vanishing.” He received the Robert Frost Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Hart Crane Poetry Prize and fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.

Allen cited Ralph Waldo Emerson, A.E. Housman, Ben Jonson and Robert Frost as his greatest influences. He co-founded the Expansive Poetry movement and was a major figure in the New Formalist movement. In a 2010 interview with The Courant’s Kathleen Megan, Allen said, “Expansive is the kind of poetry which tries to go beyond. … It has narrative and dramatic elements, rhyme and meter. It’s not just about the narcissistic self and what I did this morning, the name of my dog, and oh, how awful life is, I ate the wrong box of cereal.”

In his 1999 poem, “Being Taught,” Allen described a pivotal moment in his development as a writer:

“I looked around, and all the faces, all the clothes beneath the faces, the shapes and gestures of bodies were turning into one-line stories and I couldn’t stop summoning them and it made me dizzy; all these lives that we were taking unawares, confetti, heads of bobbing swimmers, a sentence for each life. Please, when mine is read, make it raw and beautiful at once.”

Allen also was a longtime student of Zen and that philosophy influenced his work.

Rennie McQuilkin succeeded Allen as poet laureate, a position appointed by the state Office of Culture and Tourism to advocate for poetry and bring poetry to public attention.

McQuilkin praised Allen as a poet, a supporter of others’ work and an ambassador for poetry.

“When the terrible shooting occurred at Sandy Hook, he wrote a beautiful poem that told us in ways only he could what the people of Sandy Hook and the families of those kids were suffering,” McQuilkin said Wednesday. “He rose to the occasion as a poet laureate should.”

Allen is survived by his wife, Lori; his daughter Tanya, of Wallingford; his son, Rich, of Sayville, N.Y.; his son-in-law, William Weir; and his grandson, Lincoln Weir. Arrangements for a memorial service are pending.