Leo Connellan

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Leo Connellan (1928 – February 22, 2001) was an American poet born near Portland, Maine. He grew up in Rockland, Maine, and lived at the time of his death in Sprague, Connecticut. Connellan's rough, "everyman" lyricism won him the admiration of such poet-critics as Karl Shapiro, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Eberhart, Richard Wilbur, David B. Axelrod and other major voices of the twentieth century. Connellan won the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and served as Connecticut's second Poet Laureate from 1996 until his death. From 1987 until the time of his death, he was poet-in-residence for the University of Connecticut system, and had received an honorary doctorate from the University of Maine. He was officially designated one of Maine's most prominent poets in the Maine Literary Hall of Fame.

The fishing and lobstering industries in Maine, personal battles with the bottle and unresolved conflicts from childhood served as subjects for his work. Exhibiting a rough, and at times, almost telegraphic style of clipped demotic, with the addition of metaphors that sometimes worked and sometimes didn't, Connellan's long poems are vibrant evocations of life in an outsider's America where death is omnipresent, and loading beer cans into freight cars or picking up a quick job as a fry cook could get you enough money for a night's flop in a skid row hotel.

A good example of Connellan's use of language can be seen in the following verse, which originally appeared in New and Collected Poems (Paragon House, 1989):

Through the World the Little Worm Forever

In blizzard at toll booth

trucks backed up like

empty egg crates, their

lights on in the snow falling linen dust

makes them look furious beetles,

bright round large bulbous glazed eyes

dead or glaring, like giants

tied held prisoner, taunted

by something that didn't occur to them possible.

All backed up the falling snow

flicked against trucks windshield glass

like feathers of cotton candy sticking

to windows like furry little hands it

takes scraping to get off. Cold sticking

and cunningly worked under their

big thick tires to skid them out of control.

Through the world the little worm forever while

big species vanish, invisibility is power,

victory your opponent's ignorance.

It could also be argued that the sentiment of this poem is typical of Connellan's philosophy of survival, which, as he often indicated in conversation, was drawn from hard experience and close reading of the works of Jack London and Stephen Crane.

[edit] Connellan as Teacher, Lecturer, and Bringer of Poetry to the "Common People"

Leo Connellan was an inspiring presence to many on the reading and lecture circuit because of his ability to communicate the vitality of good poetry to the young as well as to those who made their living outside of academia and considered poetry an ivory tower endeavor.