In 1943 the family moved to Astoria, Queens, where he eventually attended William Cullen Bryant High School until he dropped out in 1952.
He earned his academic diploma at night school while working as a laboratory technician in the product control labs of Pepsi-Cola.
For his MA in English literature and creative writing from Syracuse University, he studied with Donald Dike, Cecil Lang, Philip Booth and Delmore Schwartz.
[1] Algorithms (prose poems), John Allman's eighth book-length collection of poetry, was published in 2012 by Quale Press.
"[4] "Allman uses the formal powers of verse to bring shapeliness and elegance to the random mess of his own remembered experience.... Loew's Triboro is an eloquent meditation on the way mind, body, language, and desire get infused with the ghostliness of popular culture, stories and pictures inhaled in the dark.
––The Washington Post on Descending Fire and Other Stories "Allman goes back and forth between specificity and grand statement effortlessly, as though the speaker is not so much part of the landscape—the weather, the birds, the grains of sand we feel beneath our toes—as he embodies it.
As our masterful author puts it at the end of 'Watching Weather' as he watches snow on TV, the poems resemble a lake effect, 'careless as the kiss of a stranger.'"
"—Dick Allen, American Book Review Praise for Algorithms: "John Allman is master of the packed, surprise phrase, the sharp insight, intense articulated moment.