Leo Connellan (November 30, 1928 – February 22, 2001) was an American poet of the

Beat Generation The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generatio ...

born in Portland, Maine, who served as Connecticut's

Poet Laureate A poet laureate (plural: poets laureate) is a poet officially appointed by a government or conferring institution, typically expected to compose poems for special events and occasions. Albertino Mussato of Padua and Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) ...

from 1996 until his death in 2001.

Life

Leo Connellan grew up in Rockland, Maine, attended the

University of Maine The University of Maine (UMaine or UMO) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Orono, Maine. It was established in 1865 as the land-grant college of Maine and is the Flagship universities, flagshi ...

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 New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

and

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. 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 Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. Its cap ...

in 1969 to take over a new sales territory in

New England New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and by the Canadian provinces ...

. He lived at the time of his death in

Sprague, Connecticut Sprague is a town in New London County, Connecticut, United States. The town was named after William Sprague III, who laid out the industrial section. The population was 2,967 at the 2020 census. Sprague includes three villages: Baltic, Hanover, ...

. He was the uncle of

Wall Street Wall Street is an eight-block-long street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It runs between Broadway in the west to South Street and the East River in the east. The term "Wall Street" has become a metonym for t ...

businessman Peter Connellan.

Work as a poet

During the 1950s, Leo Connellan lived in

Greenwich Village Greenwich Village ( , , ) is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. 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 Karl Jay Shapiro (November 10, 1913 – May 14, 2000) was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945 for his collection ''V-Letter and Other Poems''. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to th ...

Richard Eberhart Richard Ghormley Eberhart (April 5, 1904 – June 9, 2005) was an American poet who published more than a dozen books of poetry and approximately twenty works in total. "Richard Eberhart emerged out of the 1930s as a modern stylist with romanti ...

, Richard Wilbur, and David B. Axelrod. Connellan won the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and served as

's second

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."

List of Publications

*''The Maine Poems'' (1999) *''Short Poems, City Poems, 1944--1998'' (1998) *''Provincetown and Other Poems'' (1995) *''New and Collected Poems'' (1989) *''The Clear Blue Lobster-Water Country: A Trilogy'' (1985) *''Shatterhouse'' (1983) *''Massachusetts Poems'' (1981) *''The Gunman and Other poems'' (1979) *''Death in Lobster Land: New Poems'' (1978) *''First Selected Poems'' (1976) *''Crossing America'' (1976) *''Another Poet in New York'' (1975) *''Penobscot Poems'' (1974)

References

External links

*
Maine honors

Audio link
*Cheney, Glenn Alan, "Leo Connellan, Poet Laureate of Hanover," Norwich Times, Feb. 11, 2021

{{DEFAULTSORT:Connellan, Leo American male poets Beat Generation poets Beat Generation people 1928 births 2001 deaths Writers from Portland, Maine People from Rockland, Maine Poets from Connecticut 20th-century American poets People from Sprague, Connecticut 20th-century American male writers Poets Laureate of Connecticut