Leo Richard Connellan

Leo Connellan grew up in Rockland, Maine, attended the University of Maine and served in the U.S. Army.Mainly in the 1950s, when he was between the ages of 19 and 32, Connellan travelled the contiguous 48 states, going back and forth between New York City and California.At age 32, he married his wife Nancy, and took work as a salesman after his daughter Amy was born, moving his family to Connecticut in 1969 to take over a new sales territory in New England.He lived at the time of his death in Sprague, Connecticut.He was the uncle of Wall Street businessman Peter Connellan. During the 1950s, Leo Connellan lived in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, which puts him in the Beat Generation of poets. Connellan's rough, "everyman" lyricism won him the admiration of such poet-critics as Karl Shapiro, Richard Eberhart,Richard Wilbur,and David B. Axelrod. 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. His duties in this post were little defined, but Connellan said he saw promoting poetry in schools and supporting new writers as among his most important responsibilities. From 1987 until the time of his death, he was poet-in-residence for the Connecticut State University System. He was designated one of Maine's most prominent poets in the Maine Literary Hall of Fame. Connellan took among his themes the fishing and lobstering industries in Maine, and the lives of New York commuters. His work featured in anthologies, including Wesley McNair's The Maine Poets: An Anthology of Verse, and the Curbstone Press's Poetry like bread anthology of "poets of the political imagination." ----------------------- A WORKING MAN WHO WROTE POETRY TARA WEISS; Courant Staff WriterTHE HARTFORD COURANT LEO CONNELLAN 1928-2001 Poet Leo Connellan was the emotionally abused son of a stoic Maine lawyer and the grandson of an Irish immigrant who fled the famine. When Connellan's mother died, his father called up from the bottom of the stairs to his 7-year-old son and said, "Your mother has gone to take care of someone else who needs her more than we do." Each year Connellan and his brother were taken to her grave site on her birthday, and his father assumed they'd eventually figure out she had died. He never truly recovered from that difficult childhood, and that, say friends and family, is what profoundly shaped Connellan's straightforward poetry, renowned for its rich depictions of his own experiences and the lives of the working class. It is also what kept him driving around the state working with young people, even at the age of 72, visiting high schools, middle schools and universities to lead workshops on writing. Connellan, Connecticut's state poet laureate since 1996, died Thursday night at William W. Backus Hospital in Norwich, one week after suffering a massive stroke in his Sprague home. He was 72. Connellan, who was raised in blue-collar Rockland, Maine, prided himself on his working-class status and the fact that he was not part of the art world's social and financial elite. "No, I'm not an academic," he told The Courant's Northeast magazine in July 1998. "I'm not in the club. I'm a working man who writes poems." He studied for three years at the University of Maine but left to serve for 18 months in the Army. Connellan was fond of saying that he received his real education while traveling across the country in the 1950s. He received a doctorate of humane letters from the University of Maine in May 1998. Still, he craved the attention that was bestowed on him as a three-time Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet and winner in 1983 of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. That award, voted by his peers for a body of work, puts him in the same category as Robert Penn Warren and e.e. cummings. "The fact that Leo won it was important, because he didn't win a lot of other awards; a lot of award-giving in the poetry world depends on who you know," said fellow poet Marilyn Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut. A friend, state Rep. Jack Malone, D-Norwich, recounted with a laugh Connellan's frequent phone calls that were meant to keep the politician updated on his awards and appearances. Recently, Connellan had called to tell Malone that he was listed as one of the 100 most important writers from Maine. "I just enjoyed Leo's flavor," Malone said. "He could not tolerate any pretension. I introduced him before the legislature once, and that's the only day I saw him in a tie." That need to "publicize himself" as his daughter, Amy Connellan, calls it, came from his own father's obvious disapproval of his son. The elder Connellan was known for telling friends that his son was "not a homosexual; poetry is just a hobby." So Connellan did everything he could to encourage young writers. He frenetically traveled around the state trying to meet as many students as possible. "He was going to help children understand and create and use words as their way of creating, and he wanted to teach them self-esteem," Amy Connellan said Thursday. "He was determined that he was going to do what he could to have children have confidence and believe in themselves. He believed that poetry and art are for everyone, not just for the elite and the privileged -- for the kid in the barrio as much as the kid raised in a comfortable suburban home." He used his position as poet-in-residence for the Connecticut State University system, which he had held since 1987, to teach writing workshops at middle and high schools and universities and community colleges throughout the state. Connellan averaged two to three schools per week, says William J. Cibes Jr., chancellor of the system. "We have files and files of thank-you letters from students and parents who had worked with Leo," Cibes said. "If there was one theme to those letters it was that suddenly the students were able to understand poetry and used it to express their feelings." Connellan told The New York Times in June 1996 that he rose each morning at 3 a.m. to write from 4 to 6 a.m. before heading to work. The family, his wife Nancy and daughter, lived in a house in Clinton while Connellan was a salesman for 17 years for Old Town Corp., which sold typewriter ribbons and carbon paper. But the company went out of business, and the family moved in 1979 to a modest apartment in Norwich, where they lived until 1991. That's when they moved into a townhouse in Sprague. Connellan worked as a substitute teacher and swept apartment complexes. Connellan's wake is from 7 to 9 p.m. Sunday at Labenski Funeral Home, 107 Boswell Ave. in Norwich, and the funeral is at 9 a.m. Monday at St. Patrick Cathedral, 213 Broadway, Norwich. A reception will follow the service at the Norwich Arts Council, 62 Broadway. "He was a very crotchety man, but when I sent news of his death people agreed he was a difficult man but they loved him," Nelson said. "A lot of people felt that way. A lot of people respected him. He was a poet; he was dedicated." Scott Huff Think tonight of sixteen year old Scott Huff of Maine driving home fell asleep at the wheel, his car sprang awake from the weight of his foot head on into a tree. God, if you need him take him asking me to believe in you because there are yellow buttercups, salmon for my heart in the rivers, fresh springs of ice cold water running away.