• Josh Ritter (about Allen’s first CD of songs and poems): “Your CD is AMAZING. It has totally made me rethink the potential for recorded music. I’m going to play it for everyone I know.” Paul Allen just retired as Professor Emeritus after 36 years teaching courses in poetry, form and meter, and writing song lyrics at The College of Charleston, in Charleston, SC. His poems have appeared in a number of journals as well as in several anthologies He has received the South Carolina Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry twice, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award (George Mason University), the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize from the University of North Texas Press, the South Carolina Academy of Authors Fellowship, the John Williams Andrews Narrative Poetry Prize from Poet Lore, the Distinguished Research Award from The College of Charleston (2007), and a Pushcart (XXXII, 2008). His books include American Crawl (UNT Press, 1997), His Longing (FootHills Press, 2005), Ground Forces (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2008), and a new CD of original songs, Waiting for the Last Bus. He has presented his work at over 100 venues in over a dozen US states, including Millennial Stage of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Some blurbs: • Sydney Lea "I am throwing no phony bouquets when I say that, on reading this, I often felt, as someone once said, like putting my quill back in my goose. Allen manages to be funny, deeply reverent, judicious, and moving all in the same breaths. He is one of the best poets going." • Andrew Hudgins “Ground Forces is about brokenness -- brokenness and, with richly explored theological implications, everything in the broken world, the fallen world. The voice of these poems is wildly funny, often profane (and sometimes that profanity is ironic and sometimes it's pure rage) but always exact, smart, self-aware, and driven to a song like nothing else I know in contemporary poetry." • Thomas Lynch "'Long awaited,' doesn't nearly cover the lapse that is redressed with the publication of Paul Allen's Ground Forces. Allen is an American original, whose darker visions are redeemed by the lights assembled here. Here then -- or hear then -- a mighty dose of what Dr. Williams called "the ground sense necessary." And we are all the better for his gifts." • Carol Ann Davis, author of Psalm, editor of Crazyhorse "In writing Ground Forces Paul Allen enters with terrific energy into the tradition of the mystic poets: In a poetry by turns ecstatic, searching, and raw, Allen examines the religious experience found in the everyday trials of living. Perhaps it's an osprey on a high-power line fringed with light, or the boy hitchhiker with a bad tooth that most shy away from, or the alcoholic undertaker who pieces together the suicide's skull. What we learn from Allen is how each of these "least of these" enhances and tests our own humanity. It's brave work he's done for us here." • Thomas Lynch, The Detroit Free Press (about my first collection, American Crawl) “These are not poems you can read and forget. They imprint and impact their readers with the quiet delivery of such sane and sobering images that we cannot shake them. They observe that most of our wounds are self-inflicted, and some of the wounded do not survive. Nearer to the ferocious facts of this life, these poems steadfastly avoid the temptation to instruct the reader on what to feel, or what to think, or when to feel or think it. Reading Allen, one is blessedly on one’s own. What the poet gives us, in his good-ole-boy plain chant (behind which lurks a wry and incisive witness) is the moment, the details of the case, the glimpse, however fleeting, of the Truth of the Matter.” • William Bowers, The Week: The Best of U. S. and International News “These stories and dramatic monologues in verse are preachy, fussy, and unforgettable accounts of estrangement, suicide, and salvation, told by characters who stay up late, drive hearses, hitchhike, seek rehab, and—tragicomically—almost drown.” • “A rare blend of humor and musical talent! He entertained with poetry and song and kept a tough audience of 70 in his spell for two hours. We are counting the days until he makes his return.” Will Moredock, SOCIAL JUSTICE COMMITTEE NEWSLETTER, Unitarian Church • Anne Fitzgerald, Bray Arts (Bray, Ireland) “Poet and musician, Allen seduced his audience with a unique blend of very direct poetic themes from his Ground Forces collection, punctuated by splendid musical interludes; compositions from his CD Waiting for the Last Bus. Bray Arts still talk about that October night the Carolina poet managed to charm their sensibilities with his sharp ironic wit, clear observations of human frailties and true poetic musicality.” • “Paul Allen was selected to perform in Sumter’s inaugural spoken-word series. Allen defined the term ‘performance poetry’ with his earthy, accessible lyrics and performance style. The audience responded with their raucous approval and unbridled enthusiasm.” Booth Chilcutt, Sumter Opera House