Leo, I’m on the hunt chasing you as you chased Kelly in Cummington. I hear you laughing at me. Guys like us can’t write lines like we’re Richard Wilbur going on about Ming vases in French. The academies won’t have us. "You’ll need to fight – so find your voice and believe in it."
I know this better now, missing your exuberance. You liked to say Whitman, Lorca and Ginsburg were here first and Nueva York isn’t any hermana to the likes of us. She’s a monstrous Caliban, a siren ranting in our boarded-up, walled-in heads fragranced by echoing memories of despair.
You skidded along here, bombastic eyes roving, seeking your tropes, steeping beatnik tea with Richard Eberhart and Hu Selby.
Hubert Selby Jr.
Richard Eberhart
Today, I’ve nothing new to add to, say, the West Village with its staid demands,its latest all-gay male revue, its sex toys for sale, its kittens falling into saucers of sugared urine.
The sublime and the sordid collide here, the word dildos still rhyming with meadows.
So it seems right for me to be disgusted and disillusioned. I shouldn't forget every city is a kitchen sink.
I wash my heart in their soulless stinks. I sing movie and play dance me away,
I’m in front of the Empire Diner where an old phone booth looms, no Clark Kent or transformations in the offing and I think sadly we become forgotten more quickly than we’re unborn. I hear you assure me being broke and broken and feeling gassed and gutted and used up is okay, though it doesn’t feel allowed here, not to me, not if one prefers self-respect amidst all the re-enginnering and gentrification.
You’d hate this era. The technocrats just laugh at the idea of poets. Yet I still hear you in the Hudson when I walk its muttering eclipses.
"It’s simple," you'd say. "Keep one step ahead of all the pricks out there."
You, Karl Shapiro and Kenneth Fearing wolfed down knishes from Yonah Schimmels together on the C train out to Coney Island.
You raved about Fearing and how he helped you see narrative in all things unseen. How Shapiro helped you with a better understanding of meter and Browning. You got sotted with them in Eighth Avenue haunts, feasting on sandwiches, talking scansion at Hardhat Automats or Katz’s Deli. Just rode the ferry out to Staten Island. Sipped a beer along the way. Didn't even get off. Wrote about the ferry. Wrote about the mad din, just another poet in New York, invigorated.
Rosy in the hot summertime steam I imagine you lobbed asteroids at winter skies, neon-tinctured in the ripples and gills of the subway roars erasing your anger shouts, your joys erupting into one lance after another to inspire wisdom in strange faces bent, zapped and busted.
Shedding the python miles of a treacherous ambition that feels adolescent whenever I think of you I’m ever grateful and still dogging your shadows. I’m riding the Staten Island ferry while I savor a cigar, a beer and a breeze, open to it all feeling dwarfed and wishing I had me a natty fedora, your tireless moxie and your sometimes loud, sometimes abrasive but always generous pizzazz.
You wrote of Maine, that native gripe she planted inside, that robust New England passion for the sea, those who work it and speak a plain English, and yourself, your own plain sailing and how we are never released from what we love, not completely.
Online Links
A Good Read, PBS - This is a video link to a documentary.
Meeting Benches -- Leo in the Main Literary Hall of Fame -- 2018 (article)
New York Times article, 1983. (This is included in this post, you can find it below.)
In April of 1983, Leo received the Shelley Memorial Award
from the Poetry Society of America. One of the most prestigious awards for
verse, the Shelley prize had, at that time, been awarded to the likes of Robert Penn Warren, Archibald
MacLeish and Edgar Lee Masters, and others.
Below is a review by poet Haydn Carrith, a contemporary, and a fellow New England native -- Leo was born in Maine, Haydn in Connecticut.
Brothers, I Loved You All (1978) is considered by many to be Mr. Carruth's best work. His books include North Winter (1964), For You (1970), Almanach du Printemps Vivarois (1979), Lighter than Air Craft (1985), Sonnets (1989), and Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems, 1991–1995 (1996), which won a National Book Award. His later books are Doctor Jazz (2001), and Toward the Distant Islands (2006). His literary criticism includes After “The Stranger”: Imaginary Dialogues with Camus (1965) and Effluences from the Sacred Caves: More Selected Essays and Reviews (1983). A collection of autobiographical essays titled Reluctantly appeared in 1998.
Haydn Carruth
From The New York Times Archives. It first appeared May 23, 1976. This is Hayden Carruth’s review of Leo’s First Selected Poems. 70 pp. University of Pittsburgh Press.
What I get immediately from Leo Connellan's poems is a sense of anachronism, a pleasurable nostalgic feeling. To find poems with this same bitter clarity you would have to go back to the thirties. The best Depression poetry had it, though for that matter I suppose you could go back to Sandburg, since that's where it came from, but without Sandburg's sentimentality and prolixity.
At any rate Connellan is a long way from the cool pseudo surrealism of fashionable poetry today, and a long way also from the hip attitudinizing of the Beat poets and their descendants. It is as if he is so driven by feeling that he cannot bother to be mannered. He cares nothing for affectation. His tone is harsh, even cruel, but never merely shocking. Instead Connellan uses a reliable, rough and ready technique, with vigorous cadences, open syntax (though his phrasings can be oddly original) and a simple vocabulary. I don't mean he is old‐fashioned. On the contrary, what I have in mind is more like the quality of the new.
Connellan sometimes looks backward (“We were drinking buddies in high old time town/ womb warm with Billie songs and Bird jazz”) or mutters a metaphysical outrage (“I have nodded to God and/He looked right through me”), but mainly his topic is our ordinary pain, filth and degradation here and now. Death in the streets of New York, death with the Maine lobster fleet, death in the desert or on the mountain, but always death—and of course poverty, shame, fury, insanity, loneliness and all that goes with it. “I give you ashes,” he says. They are tough poems, by no means calculated to cheer anyone up, but in their honesty and urgency they are effective —not great, perhaps not ultimately memorable, but still effective.
David B Axelrod
Below is David B Axelrod's kind and accurate and loving remembrance of Leo. He begins with a phone call, Leo's voice, brusque, open, a little manic but always generous and sincere. He would call me, as well, out of the blue. It was his way. He was loyal, never indulging in nonsense over the phone, wanting to talk poems, the craft, asking who I was reading, what I was working on. I'd write long letters to him, and I was living in LA when his daughter, Amy, phoned me, as she phoned Mr. Axelrod and many others, to share the sad news of his death.
Here is a link Mr. Axelrod's web site, which includes a full listing of all his publications:
https://poetrydoctor.org/books-by-dr-david-b-axelrod/IN MEMORIUM, LEO CONNELLAN
by David B Axelrod
“It’s me, Leo. Do you have time to listen. Listen, they just put my work on a website in Maine. I gave my daughter Amy the computer so I can’t see it but you can take a look at it. I’m one
of the people they picked as Maine’s best.”
It’s Leo Connellan on the phone burning my ear. I’ve known him since the 70’s and it’s always interesting when Leo calls. Poet Laureate of Connecticut, Poet in Residence for the
United Universities of Connecticut.
You know, I wish I could hear Leo on the phone again. It was a Thursday evening, February 22 this year, it was daughter Amy who called to tell me Leo had a massive stroke. The body lingered on but soon enough Leo was completely gone. The large physical presence of Leo, that is. Luckily, a very
large body of Leo’s poetry remains. It’s impossible to think of the poetry of Leo Connellan without thinking of the man. That’s not a biographical fallacy. Leo’s work was deeply personal, torn from the hard-scrabble childhood of Maine’s coast. He turned the premature death of parents, the abuse at the hands of those who “cared for him” into a tough American kind of poetry.
His views were somewhere between paranoid and cruelly honest. If he observed it was with a zeal-that part of him that was tough and genuine. Here’s a fellow who found his way into the literary world with a salesman’s savvy. But Leo was never a con-artist; he had the real goods to sell-quality poetry. Leo was no language poet, even as his plain style evoked instant detail. He was not afraid to write longer than
most magazines would publish even as he could scalpel a poem down to just the essentials.
Readers, with luck will find more and more of his poems in anthologies. But it is the man I want to remember here, in ways those who didn’t know him might only hear in odd anecdotes. Leo, who could tell a politically incorrect joke with aplomb. Leo who loved his wife Nancy and daughter Amy more than life-so that when he was on booze, with the greatest strength of character, he stopped to stay with them and be a good husband, father, citizen. When he was broke, he’d climb the steps of high rise buildings with a broom, swallowing his pride and sweeping for a few extra bucks.
Luckily, hard times didn’t hound Leo. He persisted even as the Muse stayed steadfastly with him. He got himself a coveted poetry sinecure in Connecticut. Fancy-ass poets, stunned by his successes, often tried to leave him out. Hurt as he was, it never affected his creativity. Leo came to poetry later than many of the wonder-boys and girls birthed yearly out of the M.F.A.’s of America. But his quantity and quality are stunning. Look at the links. Look into Leo. If ever there was an adage that would apply as inspiration looking at the life and poetry of Leo Connellan, it would be simply “Don’t let the bastards beat you down.” (I miss you Leo. Maybe give me a call…)
Tim Peeler
Mr. Peeler is a past winner of the Jim Harrison Award for contributions to baseball literature. He has also been a Casey Award Finalist (baseball book of the year) and a finalist for the SIBA Award. He lives with his wife, Penny in Hickory, North Carolina, where he directs the academic assistance programs at Catawba Valley Community College. He has written thirteen books and three chapbooks.
Below is a transcript of an interview from the Lyric Essentials program. It's between Tim Peeler and the editor of Sundress Publications. Mr. Peeler reads two of Leo's poems, and then he answers a few questions.
Here is a link to Mr. Peeler's site on You Tube, in which he reads from some of Leo's poems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cG_EubAozg&ab_channel=TPeeler
Lyric Essentials: Tim Peeler Reads
“On the Eve of My Becoming a Father” & “Shadows”
by Leo Connellan
September 24, 2015
Sundress:
Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Tim Peeler reads “Shadows” & “On the Eve of My Becoming a Father” by Leo Connellan.
Thank you for joining us Tim. When you sent in your recordings, you mentioned that Connellan was your earliest influence. How did you come across his work and what was reading that first poem like? Do you remember which one it was?
Tim Peeler:
Thanks for having me. When I was at East Carolina University doing undergrad in the late seventies, even though I was an English major, I hung out mostly with artists. A friend named Michael Loderstedt loaned me a book of poems entitled simply Selected Poems by Leo Connellan. Loderstedt, who is now a well-known artist and photographer in the Cleveland area and Kent State prof, had grown up on the North Carolina coast at a place called Emerald Isle. He had been drawn to the book because so much of it is about the lobster fishermen of Maine and their life near and on the water. The first poem in the book is a long one called “Lobster Claw.” It is written in a concise yet powerful language, and when I read it, and later the other poems, I realized that it was possible to write about blue collar people and experiences in ways that didn’t romanticize their plight or attempt to manipulate the readers’ sense of nostalgia. I looked for the book over the weekend and failed to locate it, and I can only hope that some interested person stole it from me as I did from Michael.
Sundress:
It’s interesting that you mention that Connellan doesn’t romanticize the plight of the blue collar class. Can you elaborate on why this is important (and it looks like surprising at the time)?
Tim Peeler:
It’s important because his honest treatment of the working class raises their existence to the level of art and it also helped establish his niche in the poetry world, something he achieved for most of his years, without a university affiliation or academic standing. So the first line I read of his was the opening line of “Lobster Claw” which is “Morning and I must kill,” which is probably one of the greatest first lines I’ve ever encountered.
Sundress:
Full disclosure: after listening to the poems you sent in, I searched for more online (although to my chagrin I could not find “Lobster Claw”) and read what I could. I was impressed to see that while he had attended the University of Maine, he was a salesman. That’s about as blue collar, everyman as an individual can be.
In our ‘publish or perish’, MFA-filled poetry environment, there seems to be a premium placed on university affiliation or academic standing. I’ve heard whispers of a dark Literati, playing gatekeeper to success. Universities are the Free Masons, MFA programs are the initiating handshake. On the other hand, I have heard compelling arguments against grad school. Do you feel that Connellan’s ability to raise the working class’s “existence to the level of art” was dependent on his view as a poet outside of academia?
Tim Peeler:
I think that not just his poetry but his self-concept depended on his status as an outsider. Even after he became the Connecticut poet laureate and the writer-in-residence for the University of Connecticut, and had garnered the support of writers like Richard Wilbur and Karl Shapiro, he still felt like he was the kid that didn’t fit in because he wasn’t good at sports, that could never please his father who thought that writing poetry meant he was a sissy. Connellan identified with the underdog status of the working class, and he approached the process in a very working class manner, waking at 4 AM every morning to write till 6 AM when he had to leave for whatever job, whether it be typewriter ribbon salesman, fry cook, janitor, or whatever. So by raising the level of their existence to art, he raised his own as well.
Sundress:
What immediately struck me with this first poem, “On the Eve of My Becoming a Father,” was its title. I expected a more joyous piece, but what followed was more melancholy in tone. I would have never linked this poem to fatherhood without the author’s direction. And, like it was a cliffhanger, I kept waiting on a direct reference to a newborn as I expect in a poem about impending fatherhood. A poem whose meaning changes or becomes suddenly clear only when presented with the title displays a smart economy of language. What attracted you to this poem?
Tim Peeler:
When I first read that poem, I had no idea what fatherhood was about or what a profound change having children causes in one’s life. But I did know what it was like to run wild and fail at various things in my life because I couldn’t get out of my own way, and this is what I identified with. Now when I read it, I know exactly what he’s talking about, and unlike then, I hear his nasal voice with all its sadness and hope and its yearning for love and acceptance. The poem, like most of his, is auto-biographical. Connellan traveled extensively around the United States, mostly hitchhiking, working whatever jobs he could find until he reached his thirties. When his daughter was born, he settled down in the northeast, mostly ended his bout with alcoholism, and set about telling the story of who he was and what he had done. And yes I appreciate the economy of language and I’m probably a sucker for that melancholy tone. But when I first read it, before I got to know him or to know anything much about poetic technique or poetry in general, I just knew that I liked it.
Sundress:
When you say that most of his work is autobiographical, is it always obvious and is he known for writing without a persona? In a climate where many poems are not autobiographical—and should not be taken as such—what does it mean to you knowing his poems aren’t just a persona?
Tim Peeler:
There’s always some distance between an author and his or her autobiographical self, because no one can be totally self-aware or have completely accurate memories. Yet even in Connellan’s most ambitious work, the trilogy entitled The Clear Blue Lobster-Water Country, the persona, Boppledock faces dilemmas similar to those that Connellan experienced: loss of mother in childhood, addiction and rehab, and a father’s non-acceptance. But the beauty of the work is that you don’t have to know Connellan’s personal story to experience the power of his work. I don’t know what he would have thought of today’s emphasis on communicating through a persona or for that matter what he would have thought of the proliferation of Internet poetry or MFA programs. I have often thought that the 2000 presidential election killed him, and that he died just in the nick of time.
Sundress:
Was “Shadows” another poem which you read earlier in life and came back to with new meaning?
Tim Peeler:
I do look at “Shadows” differently as an older person. When I first read it, I was a religious person, so not being one any more in the traditional sense changes my perspective on that punchline ending.
Sundress:
Both of the endings have a similar punch for me—a sense of disconnection. In the first, the moon is beyond him; in the second, God seems to be the unattainable. If you had to hazard a guess, what would you say Connellan intended us to take away from the last line of “Shadows”?
Tim Peeler:
These are both kind of punchline poems, especially “Shadows.” And I can tell you exactly what he wanted us to take away from that one. He once described to me how he was inspired to write the last line in “Shadows.” He was in traffic in New York City on a bridge, feeling sorry for himself and wishing his life had turned out better. In fact, the adult Connellan who fully realized that the Catholic church and his parochial schooling had contributed to his many problems was talking to God when it occurred to him that on this same bridge there might be someone who has “real” problems, who is in much greater need of help. So in the line, God looks right through him to see someone else who needs Him more.
Sundress:
Do you have any last thoughts about Connellan to leave us with? Perhaps any additional poems or interviews we should read?
Tim Peeler:
I would say check out his books, especially the trilogy, the selected poems from Pitt Press and Crossing America, both the written version and the version he recorded with numerous musicians from different parts of the country a few years before his death.
Regarding the earlier comment about Leo’s death—he was tremendously upset over the outcome of the Bush-Gore presidential race and how it had played out. Connellan was a staunch New England liberal who cared very much for the “common man,” and he felt this country, which he had traveled extensively as a youth and written about his whole adult life was headed in a bad direction. So maybe this did aggravate him to point that it caused a massive stroke. Who’s to say.
In closing, I would say that Leo was a really good guy and an underrated talent. I talked to him many times during the last ten or twelve years of his life, and like many aging artists he desperately wanted to be remembered and wanted his poetry to be read by future generations. I would hope that some folks discover his work through this interview, and I thank you for giving me this opportunity.
Wally Swist
Next below we have two linked pieces by Connecticut poet and native Wally Swist, one an essay that's included in the collection of criticism, Fair Warning, and the second a review of Leo's collection, Death In Lobsterland, which is part of Leo's trilogy, The Clear Blue Lobster-Water Country.
Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012); The Daodejing: A New Interpretation, with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder (Lamar University Literary Press, 2015); and Invocation (Lamar University Literary Press, 2015).
Here is a link to Mr. Swist reading from his collection, The Bees Of The Invisible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZOi18aGQfU&ab_channel=RattlePoetry
The Art and Necessity of Festschrift: Fair Warning: Leo Connellan and His Poetry,
and a Review of Leo Connellan’s Death in Lobsterland
by Wally Swist
When Leo Connellan lived in New York, he would sell carbon paper and typewriter ribbons between 8:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., then go the Limelight Café on Sheridan Square to write his poems. “I made it an atmosphere where I could write,” he says. “In that din and over cups of coffee, I realized time was passing me by, and that I didn’t have any excuses left for not writing. I embraced it.”
Festschrift (German pronunciation: [ˈfÉ›stʃrɪft]; plural, Festschriften [ˈfÉ›stʃrɪftÉ™n]) is commonly known as a book that honors a writer, often during that person’s lifetime, sometimes not. Fair Warning: Leo Connellan and His Poetry (Tokyo, Japan: Printed Matter, 2011), edited by Sheila Murphy and Marilyn Nelson, was both a long labored and much awaited publishing project.
Connecticut Poet Laureate Leo Connellan died in 2001, and although this collection of essays and reviews regarding his work was in various stages of being assembled, and then readied for publication, the Festschrift, in tribute to him, took nearly a full decade to be fully realized as a published book.
I take delight in the honor of having been invited to contribute a review that I wrote of one of Connellan’s books, Death in Lobsterland (Fort Kent, Maine: Great Raven Press, 1978), but I am doubly honored since I was also asked to contribute an endorsement for the back cover of the Festschrift, which I considered to be a privilege, since many of the contributors to the book included such poets and writers of notoriety as the eminent and perennially charming and magnanimous Richard Wilbur.
Initially, I first met Leo Connellan when I was directing a poetry reading series at The Theater and Space on Orange Street in New Haven, Connecticut more years ago now then I would like to admit. Leo Connellan was enjoying his first real literary success upon his publishing First Selected Poems in the University of Pittsburgh Press Poetry Series—and he was then in his late forties or early fifties. He was a man who lost his mother as a child; entertained visions of becoming a writer as a young man, which sprung him from a hardscrabble life in Maine, upon which he would eventually base his big American poems; hitchhiked the country and would go on to write most memorably about the experience, in an historical as well as personal context; could reminisce about seeing Dylan Thomas drink pints of stout in the White Horse Tavern in the Village; and whose very essence and being, despite being a married man and a father of a daughter, at that time, depended on poetry and the writing of it.
Leo Connellan was only the second Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut, after the Pulitzer Prize-winning James Merrill. In opposition to Merrill’s urbanity and financial wealth and his stature in the greater literary community, Leo Connellan was a working man, albeit one who was a salesman in a white collar, and a working man’s poet. Although comparisons aside, Leo Connellan worked tirelessly during his years as Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut in the Poetry-in-the-Schools Program. Whether it was deep gratitude of his being awarded his new status or his devout love of poetry that mattered, and probably both, his being a proponent of the written word and teaching students of all ages anywhere from grammar school to high school to college was a passion tantamount to his devotion of writing his own poetry, if not more so.
Leo Connellan’s life and his poetry are entwined. His work celebrates the human spirit as well as portraying what the editor of the periodical my review was published in chose as the headline to the piece as “Injustices of the Human Heart.” Although Leo Connellan left Maine not long out of his teens, its rocky coast and the calloused fingers and palms of its farmers and fisherman remained in his psyche and became the very ethos of his poetry which today often goes overlooked despite its largesse in the most American of senses—since it resembles, in its metaphysical girth, a symphony by Aaron Copeland or a painting by Edward Hopper. If you seek the American grain, of course you would immediately think of William Carlos Williams and his notion of composition he called the variable foot and of such books of his as Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, which was the epitome of his shorter lyrical poems as well as the vastness of his four book-narrative poem Patterson; whereas, with Leo Connellan his classic shorter poetry is collected in his last book, The Maine Poems and his now little appreciated masterpiece was his book-length poem, Crossing America, illustrated with woodcuts by one of the great masters of the genre, Michael McCurdy, and issued from the artist’s now legendary Penmaen Press.
To augment, and certainly to enlighten, the legacy of the poetry of Leo Connellan and his spirit, I enclose my lengthy back cover endorsement, which was only used in part on the back of the Festschrift, and then my review of one of this poet’s seminal books, Death in Lobsterland.
In his poem “On the Eve of Becoming a Father,” Leo Connellan writes that he “had been about to hang up” his proverbial “gun,” however “the hammer shot one spark into the moon,/ so magnificent, it is beyond me.” The poem is from First Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976). That book remains a volume of lasting and memorable poems, and that is rare for any book in any genre. The author of those poems was only beginning, although well past his mid-forties, he was to eventually write and publish his best work in a series of subsequent books, often by waking at dawn, before going out into the world to make his living as a traveling salesman, to pen his poems that are cut straight from the American grain.
The poetry of Leo Connellan is a poetry of perseverance. He survived the loss of his mother as a child, and, forgoing his having completed a college degree, entered into the arena of American literature, whose territory is often enough overseen only by academics. However, his books continue to speak for themselves, and more importantly, not just for poetry, but for America herself. Connellan begins his book-length poem, Crossing America, with these autochthonous and memorable lines: [line]
We hitchhiked America. I
still think of her.
I walk the old streets thinking I
see her, but never.
New buildings have gone up.
The bartenders who poured roses
into our glasses are gone.
We are erased.
Although Connellan’s poetry has persevered beyond all erasure, like a palimpsest, Crossing America, with respect to literary achievement alone, truly belongs next to its fictional counterpart, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
I can still see Leo reading his poems aloud, with one hand conducting the line breaks of each verse like a conductor with a baton leading a symphony orchestra, his voice enunciating the last word of each line like a sculptor who has chiseled them out of the granite of the post-WWII American experience. Thankfully, we have his treasure trove of poems of survival: “Amelia, the Mrs. Brooks of my Childhood.” “By the Blue Sea;” “Tell Her that I Fell;’ and lesser known gems, such as “Blueberry Boy,: finding him, and us, before “the tripup of manhood,” on our collective knees
"picking/ frantically with expert watered tongue,/ ignorant of what lay out of the woods.”
Now, there is a Festschrift in his honor that is a veritable celebration of the poetry of Leo Connellan, as it is a tribute to America, and why the work of Leo Connellan is a significant contribution to American literature.
A poem is an anonymous gift to an anonymous recipient; and when you’re finished with it, it doesn’t belong to you anymore, it belongs to someone else. —Karl Shapiro, in a letter to Leo Connellan
Leo Connellan is a poet who has weathered a fourteen year silence from writing, a bout with alcoholism, and a number of nine-to-five jobs as a traveling salesman. He portrays his home state of Maine, where the winters can be as harsh as the economy, with verbal crispness, deep empathy, and an active compassion. His poems are often funereal, tragic, and resonant. “So many of my poems are about Maine because that’s where I come from. They’re about working men, about the injustices of the human heart,” says Connellan, who at the age of fifty has just published his eighth collection of poems, Death in Lobsterland. You don’t have to come from Maine to appreciate his work. Nor do you have to be an academic to understand it, although Connellan is an exceptional craftsman. His poems lure you with their lyricism, then snap shut like a lobster trap. Take the poem “Scott Huff,” for example:
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.
You can have all of these back for Scott Huff.
After attending the University of Maine, Connellan took his chances spinning around the country like a chip played on a roulette wheel. For Connellan, Maine would be a place he would always return to, that would draw him back again and again, but New York City proved to be his primary stomping ground from the mid-50s through the early 60s.
When he lived in New York, he would sell carbon paper and typewriter ribbons between 8:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., then go the Limelight Café on Sheridan Square to write his poems.
"I made it an atmosphere where I could write,” he says. “In that din and over cups of coffee, I realized time was passing me by, and that I didn’t have any excuses left for not writing. I embraced it.”
“My career as a writer began by what I thought writing might be,” Connellan continues. “The trick of writing is simplicity. The thing to do is edit. Once the idea is clear, get rid of excess words. Excess words reveal the writer is bluffing behind nothing to say. I don’t rush. The poem will be done when it is. But the minute you have to explain it you’re writing prose.”
Finally, Penobscot Poems was published by New Quarto Editions in 1974. Then a quick succession of books followed—Another Poet in New York (Living Poets Press); First Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press); Crossing America (Penmaen Press); Seven Short Poems (Western Maryland College Writers Union); and in 1978, from Great Raven Press, of Fort Kent, Maine, Death in Lobsterland.
"Writing is something you can’t help yourself from doing,” he says after his years of struggle. “It is everything to me, and I knew I could write if I didn’t die from bad luck or from drinking.”
Connellan is an elegist, making Death in Lobsterland his best work in many ways.
“It is the book I always wanted to write,” he says.
The book contains many long narrative poems such as “By the Blue Sea,” “Edwin Coombs,” and what just may be the poem he may be most remembered by, “Amelia, Mrs. Brooks of my Old Childhood”—all painful reminiscences knotted like the calloused hands of the fisherman and cannery workers that they both criticize and eulogize.
They are raw and overpowering poems, compelling rereading after rereading. They have so much life compressed in them that they throb like the ache of a lobsterman’s hands.
Simultaneous with the publication of Death in Lobsterland, the film Leo Connellan at 50 was released and aired on public and cable television.
"There are two ways that we write,” says Connellan. “Either we are born brilliant or something disturbs us.” He claims that “all good writing is realized by us because of what the writer has written for the reader to fill in. This gives us the feeling that we’ve had something to do with its accomplishment. I think this is the secret of art.”
Leo Connellan has succeeded in what he set out to do so many years ago in Rockland, Maine, his hometown, where he feels “it was an accomplishment to be born there, grow up, and leave.”
In his work, he fulfills his own poetic credo—writing big American poems that are worth rereading and endowing the reader with a sense that these works of art are in part their own accomplishment.
SPOKEN WORD CD'S
CROSSING LEO:
Crossing America CD Puts Leo Connellan To Music
Wayne NJ's Skunty.com, which recently released a CD of the late poet Leo Connellan reading all 30 sections of 'Crossing America," with full musical interpretation, is to be congratulated on producing a work of great force and power that grows in likeability with each hearing.
Created by an intrepid group of producers who were both lucky and industrious, the CD brings to dramatic life the work of a poet who, for all his awards and recognitions, has not yet achieved the renown his work ought to command.
Leo Connellan (1928-2001), originally from Portland Maine, was poet laureate of Connecticut, was awarded the Shelley Memorial Award from the PSA (for the 1982 "Clear Blue Lobster-Water Country), and was a writer who was praised by both the Bohemians and the Academic during his lifetime. In fact Connellan regularly won the praise of such established figures as Karl Shapiro, Richard Eberhart, Hayden Carruth, Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur.
Yet in his career he remained very much an outsider - perhaps because Connellan is a writer whose stance straddle worlds, one of those whose gift is both gruff as the earth and yet schooled by the grim unyielding demands of the intellect.
Now, with a CD of his work which has been released and is circulating in the New York area - through Skunty.com at PO Box 4308 Wayne NJ 07474; info@skunty.com - the possibility emerges that a new public will be exposed to the work of a man who portrayed vividly the honest and passionate, and sometimes the stalking and the helpless, underbelly of America.
Connellan, declared Paragon House when they published his collected poems in 1989, "belongs squarely among Whitman's landscape of roving energy and spirit." Richard Wilbur called his poetry vivid, harsh, spare, surely cadenced and colloquially eloquent." They both missed a key word - monumental: "Crossing America," published in 1976, has a monumental quality to it.
It belongs in the category of the memorable writing of the twentieth century which is Whitmanian, in fact, mixing into its fundamental elegaic adoration of America's expanse a social and psychological consciousness missing in 19th century diction. To go along with Walt's incredible sense of celebration, here is alienation, protest and a profound sense of loss or failure in the shadow of America's literary tramps hoofing it across the continent.
James Dickey tries in his poem, "Folksinger of the Thirties," but against Connellan's work Dickey's pales - as hypothetical and distant compared to the "Crossing America," which thoroughly convinces us that he's lived the tale he's telling.
It also surpasses, one might argue easily, Bukowski. This is poetry that is far more than an the angel/derelict pose, entertaining and authentic as Bukowski's beer-soaked musings may be. No less a critical authority than the Hudson Review affirms this view, saying without compunction that Connellan writes "much better than Charles Bukowski, but with the same unrelenting fierceness, fueled by what he has seen of this country's underside."
This is nowhere more evident than in 'Crossing America,' written in America's bicentennial year, seemingly with an acute consciousness of that fact.
'Crossing America' is quite simply an astounding work, a pastiche of snapshots and vignettes told in thirty sections. This long poem, dedicated to "the woman who crossed America with me" by Connellan, stands shoulder to shoulder with the works of great mid-20th century American story-tellers - Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac, Hart Crane and John Steinbeck - for its scope, richness and trans-continental sweep.
We are confronted by the freezing shotgun moments on abandoned roads, suspicious and dangerous encounters in one room backwash shacks. Connellan plums the miserable depths of cold and loneliness, mercy and desperation, innocence and devotion, and even love, in section after section - as in Minook Illinois:
Minook Illinois,
one street ouf of no where through cornstocks.
winter clutched the cornfields into Chicago.
Cold, we couldn't get in out of the cold.
But a lonely filling station owner risked
letting his death in out of the night.
I lay on his gas station floor and let her
use me as a bed.
I will never forget the cold into
my kidneys or lying awake bearing the
pain while she slept like a two month
old child on the hill of its mother's tit.
It was on that stone floor
that I knew I loved her
It is composed of a myriad of rich small town American vignettes from a lost time when sheriffs ran drifters out of town, work gangs worked the apple country and cross-country hustlers whisked loose dollar bills from drunks in unwary midwestern bars. Appropriately to the time of its publication during the nation's bicentennial, there is a harkening to a lost American wildness: "You are gone like buffalo never/existed in my time, except up from Pueblo,/Colorado, freak herd for truck diner/steaks now. In a museum for children/who will never know they roamed/open plains as you whistled on a halo/of congealed smoke through quiet/back-o-towns pulling our nation together/like a stubborn zipper."
The work is also infused with literary allusion, frequently direct, and directed toward poetic icons - Whitman, Lorca, Frost, Hart Crane.
Sometime the reference leads Connellan to the elegaic, even in his hard-bitten weighed down New England overcoat twang, as in the brilliant section III on Vermont: "Frost lived in blood spouting green/and white blinding snow and was/stronger than anything that could/kill him, but finally death yanking him out/of the world he would never have left."
But the poet is also capable of crying out against social malaise. "Federico! we must not/mark our Bicentennial/until no man can languish//or die imprisoned in a land/of the free and the brave" he writes, addressing Lorca, "you and I are bitter together." Or here, in Section XI: "Walt Whitman, because our whole song/springs from the nest of your whiskers, I/scream to you of poor people..." Connellan goes on to chastise poets from Allen Ginsberg to Gertrude Stein and Hart Crane for not noticing as poverty rotted through the body of the American people ("Allen Ginsberg, what on earth is Gertrude Stein/doing to you down in your Cherry Valley...//Hart Crane, while you were noting/the telephone poles stretching across our ghost...")
Time and again Connellan proves himself capable of calling forth a voice possessed with the pungency of sourdough bread, haunted by experience - arresting as skunk cabbage in a new spring hollow. He hovers between presenting himself as a lost drifting son, an egregious hustler fleecing women and drunks, and an alter ego of the lost generation of working men set awash across hobo America during the Depression era. "The apple country when/Sunday smelled of our taste buds,/our loneliness rattled in freight..."
It should also be noted that there is frequently in the work a barely restrained power and unmasked wrath at the domineering of fathers anywhere.
For all the years unable to cope I
write this, for all the ruined children
of others pacing their lives out in white
rooms I write this, stab me with thorns
of roses for writing this, let ground glass
be in all I eat for the loathesome back handed
ingrate treachery of writing this, but youth
does not dust its trail in the whim of the old man.
One might argue that a work with qualities like these deserves to be examined as one of the major achievements of American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. And one might hope that the newly released CD could prompt such a reexamination.
The story of how the CD came to pass makes for compelling reading in itself. It seems Leo met a group of musicians in Connecticut from a local arts collective called Hoobellatoo, who heard him read a poem in his 'skid-row lobsterman's twang' and were smitten. That moment occurred in Willimantic, Ct, in the basement of Curbstone Press, recording some local poets, notes Chris King of Skuntry, when Leo departed from the scripted session during a break and read from a portion of Crossing America. It was brutal, frank and lyrical, and King and others were stunned.
Michael Shannon Friedman of Skuntry.com was later to call the poem a work which 'considers America itself as a kind of poem, a desolate hymn to beauty, pain and loss...a testimony to the possibilities of encounter' with the road. Of Connellan's poetic oeuvre, he aptly notes its 'disenfranchised, too-emotionally candid" nature, "not talk-show enough for the culture of victimization and complaint."
The poem reflects on Connellan's 1950s jaunts hitch hiking across America.
We hitchhiked America. I
still think of her.
I walk the old streets thinking I
see her, but never.
New buildings have gone up.
The bartenders who poured roses
into our glasses are gone.
We are erased.
Thankfully, notes King, the mike was not off, and for the rest of that field recording journey he and his friends "wore out a cassette dub of Leo's reading." It wasn't until later that King learned that what they had heard was only one section of the thirty-section epic, and were able to get Connellan to record the entire work.
After recording Connellan reading the poem in its entirety, King and friends reckoned that the material amounted to 37 minutes, it turned out, and after living inside the poem for awhile, determined to coax a range of musicians to work up musical interpretations for each section.
That effort brought them on a pilgrimage to locations around the nation as diverse as Brooklyn and New Jersey to Vermont, Maine and rural Illinois. They recorded Matt Fuller in a garage in Los Angles, William Teague on the South Side of St Louis, an anonymous tuba player at an herb store and a brass band at a high school. "We crossed America with Leo's poem," said King.
The result is compilation of a panoply of music, as varied and diverse as America. There's the plaintive, front-porch harmonica work of Pops Farmer (and Rich Hubbs' backwoods banjo). There are shattered modernist pianistic moments, courtesy of Nate Shaw. Moody trumpet and bass work come from the artistry of the Esser Brothers. Dave Stone Trio's incredibly driving be-bop sax racing through passages.
Quite a few of the strongest pieces carry a mountain-home rangy angularity to them, as written and performed by Three Fried Men, including the sections on Green Vermont, True With Silence, and Just Around The Corner From Night. This group offers up a funky roadhouse sound, three wheels on the ground, some crazy combination of Lowell George, Tom Waits and Zappa, authentic and tangential as a hobbling and hungover country drunk.
And a clear highlight of the CD is the chain gang thrust of The Apple Country, performed by Rosco Gordon & The Rotten Dogs.
From the NY Times Archive, May 29, 1983
AWARD-WINNING POET FACES LIFE AS IT IS
By Samuel G. Freedman
When he was trying to promote one of his books of poetry, Leo Connellan sent a copy to Nelson Algren, the novelist. Some months later, supporting himself as a chemicals salesman, Mr. Connellan found himself in Hackensack, N.J., where Mr. Algren then lived. The two met.
''He told me, 'You're an idiot to be a poet,' '' Mr. Connellan recalled. '' 'You'll die someday and no one'll give a damn. They'll say you were a sucker.' ''
''I don't worry about that,'' Mr. Connellan said here the other day, recounting Mr. Algren's words. ''I'm not in the business for that. It was never a reason I wrote and it was never a reason I didn't write.''
''I wrote my poems because I wanted to be a writer,'' he said. ''I wrote my poems because I had to write. No one told me to. No one paid me to. And eventually someone took notice. It took care of itself.''
In April, Mr. Connellan received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. One of the most prestigious awards for verse, the Shelley prize previously has gone to Robert Penn Warren, Archibald MacLeish and Edgar Lee Masters, among others.
Mr. Connellan has won several other awards and various grants as well. He has written 11 books of poetry. He has appeared at colleges and high schools. His work has been reviewed by The New York Times and The Boston Globe, whose critic, Christina Robb, wrote, ''The poems are kind to the tongue and go straight to the heart. No one in his region is writing better, truer verse than this.''
Yet few libraries or bookstores carry Mr. Connellan's books. ''I've had problems getting them myself,'' he said. He does not have a professorial position to support his muse. He makes $6,000 a year as a substitute teacher in and around Norwich. He lives with his wife, Nancy, and daughter, Amy, in an apartment. The living room has a weary-looking yellow carpet. One lamp does not have a shade. There is one painting on the wall.
There is no romance in life like this. This is not a 25-year-old living in TriBeCa or Paris, approximating garret life. This is how an acclaimed, award-winning poet lives on his teaching salary and his wife's $15,000-a-year job as a social worker.
Leo Connellan does an odd dance with the idea of fame. He has lived reasonably well without it for 55 years, but as a man with bills to pay and an art of which he is proud, he cannot entirely dismiss the financial niceties of being noticed.
''We live in a society of neon success,'' he said. ''I don't resent Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney having $400 trillion in the bank. But when Paul McCartney can write a song that goes, 'Someone's knocking at my door. Let 'em in, let 'em in,' and someone with intelligence is listening to it on the car radio and strumming the dashboard, then someone's got the keys to thoughtlessness in our society.
''I'm terrified by the thought of computers in our schools doing our thinking for us. Where's our inner motivation going to come from?''
Much of Mr. Connellan's came from a harsh family life in Maine. His three-book trilogy - the first two volumes are published, the third in progress - partly hinges on the death of his mother and the search for his father's affection. In the second volume of the trilogy, ''Shatterhouse,'' Mr. Connellan wrote: The air was mean. Children were to be ''seen'' and not ''heard.'' It was a miracle anyone ever grew up. He remembers writing his first short story, ''Trash Can Think, Too,'' at age 8, and he won poetry prizes from Scholastic magazine when he was 15 and 16. His father's reaction, he said, was to assure family friends, ''He's not homosexual. The poetry's just a hobby.''
The secret of his poetry, Mr. Connellan said, is ''involvement in life.'' It is an elastic term, an elastic concept, big enough to include his decade of rambling across the United States, his domestic chores and annoyances, childhood beatings, drunkenness, group therapy, Mickey Mantle, a rodeo cowboy riding a bull, Billie Holiday singing a ballad.
Other poets and literary critics, too, have noticed the anchor of realism in Mr. Connellan's work. Alexander Harvey, the poet, has called Mr. Connellan ''a poet of raw encounter and bitter anguish.'' Hayden Carruth, reviewing ''First Selected Poems'' in The New York Times, wrote, ''It is as if he is so driven by feeling that he cannot bother to be mannered.'' He identified Mr. Connellan's subjects as ''always death - and of course poverty, shame, fury, insanity, loneliness and all that goes with it.''
''I don't know what I have to give as a poet,'' Mr. Connellan said. ''I felt probably I was as native American as anybody and I could understand people as well as anybody. I think I understood the frustrations of common people and the fix the country is in.''
''Maybe deprivation makes the art,'' he continued. ''I grew old fast. I took it in the teeth. I worked 19 years selling typewriter ribbons and carbon paper and the company closed one year before I got my pension. But as far as complaining, I have a lot of friends who are pretty proud I haven't blown my brains out. I could've been a heroin pusher. I could've stayed in the business world and been a liar and a whore.''
Yet Mr. Connellan, despite the literary successes of his youth, did not set out to be a poet. He first tried to write short stories and novels. He spent many years traveling and doing odd jobs and, later, living around New York and holding sales jobs. He did not resume writing actively until his marriage in 1961. He tells the story of his coming - or coming again - to poetry in terms of failures as much as successes.
''I wanted to be anyone but who I was,'' he said. ''I wanted to be Hemingway, Faulkner. I wanted to write prose as good as 'The Big, TwoHearted River.' I wanted to be Stephen Crane. I wrote bad short stories - bathetic, mentally ill. I look at them now and I can't believe I thought they were good.''
''In searching for things to create,'' he said, ''I was very dumb. I was not bright. Bright is Delmore Schwartz. Bright is Hart Crane. Someone like me has to work hard for every image.
''As a writer, the thing you have to remember is that William Butler Yeats said a writer must be willing to totally fail in order to try to succeed.''
Mr. Connellan has attacked his craft with the tenacity of his Yankee upbringing. When he was a traveling salesman, he wrote from 7:30 to 9 P.M. in his motel room each evening.
''It was a schizophrenic life,'' he recalled, ''of saying anything, telling any lie, to sell during the day and then being pure at night.''
These days, he rises at 4:30 A.M., bathes, shaves and makes coffee and then writes undisturbed from 5 to 6 A.M. He believes in writing everything, every thought and rant, and then cutting and editing again and again.
''You have to be willing to get it all out of yourself,'' he said. ''And then you have to be willing to go through the dreck, to throw away. At this point in my writing life, if I've written 75 pages, I can probably save 14. All this work, all this work - there may not be anything in it. But it's still the old-fashioned word, kid, W, O, R, K.''
When he is done with a poem, he said, ''I hold it to a mirror and say, 'Does this slap me in the face?' If it does, I know I have something.''
But he issues a harsh verdict on his work. ''If you ask me if I think I've succeeded,'' he said, ''I think I have six short poems and four long ones that come close to achieving what I wanted.
Lastly, we have Jo Page's tribute to Leo. Ms. Page is a former Program Assistant at the NYS Writers Institute and currently a practicing minister. She's the author of a memoir, Preaching In My Yes Dress. Here is a link to her web site. https://www.jograepage.com/the-book
Leo Connellan: From the New York State Writers Institute
By
Jo Page
Leo Connellan writes so close to the bone the marrow sometimes threatens to ooze out and the reader doesn't know whether to fear contamination or the poet's disintegration. Poetry so unselfconscious, like the textures and excrescence of the human body, is by turns revolting, compelling, assaultive or gorgeous.
But the work is not simply a tableaux of sensations. Connellan's is a moral vision; the vigor of the poetry reflects the pain of frustrated hope. Reading New and Collected Poems the reader recognizes that Connellan's poetry is chiefly a plea for order in a world set askew from the mildest of anybody's good intentions. Connellan eschews Job's righteous thunder at God, and instead asks the more poignant questions about human love--or nearly everywhere the lack of it.
The language he uses constantly bespeaks the urgency of this question. Lines are impacted with image upon image, like a French surrealist poet gone off a Lenten fast. The speaker in most of the poems is part-lawyer, part-liturgist, in a dual bid to both captivate and persuade the reader. So that when Connellan lets loose with his verbal turbulence he reveals not a warrior's necessary bravado, but an innocent's reactionary astonishment that the world is not a better place than it is.
Throughout his fifty-some years as a poet, Connellan explores this theme from the vantage point of the itinerant wanderer (in Another Poet In New York and Crossing America), through the lenses of persons marginalized by economics or killed in wars or war zones (The Gunman and Other Poems and Penobscot Poems).
But Connellan is not easily labeled a political poet. Most of his work is highly personal; politics, like religion, is just one of the scrims through which he looks at life's meaning and purpose.
In the three-part long narrative poem, The Clear Blue of Lobster-Water Country, Connellan takes a reckoning of his life, skating from a real or imagined encounter with a real or imagined boyhood foe ("Coming To Cummington to Take Kelly") to his wryly wise reflection on doing time in a rehabilitation. hospital ("Shatterhouse") to the modulated peacefulness of "The Clear Blue of Lobster-Water Country" in which he writes:
What
keeps us in some place called Heaven without
struggle and disappointment? . . .What do we do when
our excuses and blame are used up, gone, and there
we all are with each other. . .? Mother, would
it be better if we never met?
Is that what happens, yearning is only a device
to get us through this earth living until
we have earned whatever complicated
eternity is ours for our evil or our goodness but in it
there are no reunions, our life was our life
and while we are what we call alive
on this earth, we miss those who impregnated
and carried us--in our fright
of the unknown and our ignorance . . .
The poems in Connellan's recent book, Provincetown, push past the narrowly autobiographical focus of much of the earlier work. In doing so, they expand a view on the twin themes most recurrent to Connellan--the need to voice experience and have that voice remain unsilenced, and the need to connect meaning to the experience of which he must speak.
In "The Shadow of A Leaf" which appears both in Provincetown as well as in New and Collected Poems, Connellan blends an elegiac with a hortatory tone. He creates a poem that decries the ephemerality of life and pleads for speech from the uninterrupted silence of the dead. In many ways, this form of plea and lament embodies the heart of Connellan's philosophic concerns. The poem stands, among the three long poems that ballast Provincetown, as a kind of keystone.
He writes:
It is as if we are in a never realized Portrait;
our breathing prevents the finished picture,
and without our breaths something isn't in it.
Connellan indulges the reader, whose curiosity goes to the place where "breathing prevents the finished picture" like a tongue to a broken tooth. He conjures images of the deaths of others--through hanging, through shooting up--and he writes of "sending someone there without/our going, the nearest we can come to this fear of ours."
But is being death's voyeur enough to satisfy? Merely sending someone to death or to watch death take a person is not the same as getting the knowledge of death, right out of the mouth of dead. And knowledge comes only with the experience itself:
He is now seeing what I’m denied to see, so, in this
moment of his death is envy. . .even in the act of vengeance
you escape me in your knowledge now and I wish
I could call you back for a moment, rip
tombstones to ask you, burst your coffin and give you
your life in exchange if I must ask
you not did it hurt but what do you know now. . .
Here Connellan's quest echoes the one of the rich man in the biblical parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. In the parable, the rich man, consigned to Hades, implores the god-figure Father Abraham to send Lazarus from the dead to warn the living of what lay ahead for them. Similarly, Connellan pleads for audience with the dead, a voice of warning or encouragement from the beyond:
yet as we leave this life
it is wished we would not hush but tell
what we know now. Life is quiet.
We make all the noise there is in the world.
Otherwise, without our noise,
the earth is as quiet as earth.
The silence of death is not only obliteration; it is a kind of cheat. What is the point of living if no words are sent back by which one can gauge the luster or even the lackluster of living? Connellan probes insistently, but not without a sense of humor. He exhorts a dead man, buried in a cemetery:
Here, a grave dug with no committees met to say
you couldn't stay in the very earth ground of your
whole life but must be put in a prescribed meadow
with everyone you never knew. Well, you never ever
spoke to them anyway, so your silence
will always be normal, usual, though
you are buried away from what made
sense in your living at all "forever." You
are gone forever. What do you know!? It must
be all right or everyone would not allow
nondescript removal. . . Please at least call back!
you can't?. . . then. . . hint what you know, eery even
in what we think comes to us when a door slams.
. . .We're disappearing anyway!
Hint what you know. I know what you know! No
I don't but I think I do but thinking I do know
does not make it all right with me to leave, no.
The imperative to "call back" punctuates the poem in several places. Connellan, whose enterprise over the decades has been to speak and be heard--as a poet and, in particular a poet outside the mainstream of the academy--now insists on a response. To speak alone is not enough; understanding one's purpose in life requires some outside verification, some response.
The weight of knowing that we will leave what we know colors all our living actions. "The leaves vanish but are in the buds of Hardwood" he writes, alluding either consciously or unconsciously to his boyhood poem "The Leaf." A poem extolling the miracle of a leaf's annual regeneration, it ends on the hopeful note that "all the while I'm in the trees/From which I'll bud next May."
Connellan sees that, among all that is lasting in human experience, it is human existence alone that is ephemeral, unable to be called back.
We are gone and no one can know if we need help. . . because
we don't
call back. . . and in all our discoveries we must achieve
a way to call from here. . .Hell is here knowing that
we are born, developed, informed, experienced
and come to like and desire but leaving what we know!
Eden’s real curse on us from a God who says
we bear guilt.
Unlike Job, whose righteous outrage is assuaged by the response of an overwhelming God, Connellan can find neither divine nor human voice to verify the purpose of human existence. Frustrating business that it is, it is left to the living to make sense of life. In the poetry, Connellan calls back, ahead of time.
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)[18]
Crossing America (1976)
Another Poet in New York (1975)
Penobscot Poems (1974)
