Andy Thibault

Andy Thibault

The Life of the Poet
During 50 years of writing poetry, Leo Connellan has kept the faith and
kept working hard. Now he's reaping some rewards.
BY ANDY THIBAULT
Connecticut Magazine, December 1995

Hear the poet who talks over the backyard fence, to the next guy on the assembly line, to the clerk, to the chambermaid:

Father, we'll meet again.
You can tell me you love me then.

Father is dead. Planted. Gone forever. But the poet, Leo Connellan, is not giving up. Not just yet. He constructs a foot race in which he defeats the bully who terrorized him as a child.

For you. Father, I imagined up a contest.
Sought out an adversary where none exists,
To win your heart beyond the grave where I
Never had it here.
Will my only child, daughter,
seek me out as I seek you out!?

       Now the academics and poetry elite are listening to Connellan as well. El Bardo The Legend, as his admirers like to call him, has developed a following as New England's working-class poet, and at age 67 is producing some of his best work. His 12th book, Provincetown & Other Poems, was scheduled for a second printing after only eight months on the bookstore shelves. His 50 years of work represent a triumph of his will to be a responsible, providing father, a husband and a poet. The poems themselves are a celebration of perseverance, day-to-day survival, and a heart that refuses to quit.

      Connellan, who lives with his wife and daughter in a modest apartment in the old mill town of Sprague in eastern Connecticut near Norwich, is also a top contender to succeed the late James Merrill as Connecticut's poet laureate. More than a few players in the poetry power structure see an intriguing evolution as a so-called proletariat writer is considered to replace Merrill, an erudite heir to a Wall Street fortune. Among those who have put Connellan's name before the Connecticut commission of the Arts is poet James Laughlin of Norfolk, the editor and publisher for Ezra Pound. Laughlin says he was moved by Connellan's "ability to establish a meaningful, even a colloquial relationship with his readers. As a poet myself," he added, "I envy him his directness."

      Also in Connellan's corner is Sydney Lea, editor of the New England Review. Lea suggested to the arts commission that is now time for Connellan, a "more vernacular, populist, even Whitmanian" writer, to be
Connecticut's poet laureate.

      In person, Connellan cuts a large and complex figure. When he gives a reading, he enters a room tentatively. He is certain of his work, but not his audience. He usually begins by making small talk, feeling out the crowd.

      "I was very skeptical when I first met the guy," says David Wilson of Bantam, an investment and insurance adviser. "I'm not one who reads books or takes time to smell the roses. But he basically drew me in."

      They met at a recent business luncheon in Litchfield, where Connellan was the guest speaker. As he often does, the poet began the session by making fun of his own prodigious girth, comparing himself at one point to a "pregnant water buffalo." He also wondered aloud if he truly did have anything to offer, then spoke of his military service and his abiding belief in the United States as the land of opportunity for a hustler.

      "What sustained some of us during the Depression," Connellan said, "was the belief that the common man could pursue happiness. Those of us who believed this actually believed you could go out and do whatever you wanted. I chose to be a poet. I took my chances."

      You could see him sizing up the room, like a salesman measuring the prospects before him. His close friend David Shippee, a New London insurance salesman, says Connellan does this at every reading, whether it's at Harvard, Brooklyn Polytech or an adult education class in Groton.

      "He's got that salesman's knack for reaching the audience," Shippee says. "It's called street smarts. Wherever he goes, he ends up enthralling people."

      Connellan told the group of Litchfield Rotarians that his mother died when he was 7, and that he has spent his entire life wondering what she would think of him. While on the subject of motherhood, he read from a news story about an aborted fetus that had been placed in another woman's womb. It was a story that had led him to write a poem, which he called "Let's Fall in Love."

My mother was an abortion.
No, I mean it, an unborn fetus
eggs planted in a hippopotamus
so if I seem an animal
There's this good reason
but I'm empty from not knowing
my real mom who was never here
so I could be antisocial or distant
or in so much need I'm overwhelming.
Should I love my birth mom
or my mom mom?

      "Much of my work is written out of what disturbed me," Connellan says later, over coffee at a Torrington coffeehouse. He wrote his first poems at age 17, as a high school student in Rockland, Maine. Two poems won
national prizes and were published in Scholastic Scope. When he saw his plaque placed in the trophy case next to one for the football team, he decided poetry was for him.

     Many of his classmates would become farmers, factory workers or lobstermen. He spent summers working in a sardine factory. From Maine he went to Greenwich Village, where his circle of associates at places like the White Horse Tavern included Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, James Baldwin and Maxwell Bodenheim.

      "I was trying to get away from a small town," he recalls. "I went to New York in 1949 and I happened to meet a lot of well-known people. I sat with Dylan Thomas in the White Horse Tavern when I couldn't write. I think he was almost revolted by what I showed him as a poem."

      "But he was a decent guy. I didn't know Dylan personally as a friend, but we knew each other the way you know people who you sit and drink with and see all the time. He was working man's human being. He never went in the place and bragged about who he was. He never postured. He was a great artist, but he had a sense of the world. He didn't flout it. The guys who push you around are third-raters."

      Connellan liked much of what he found in New York. "Greenwich Village was a place to hide," he says, "and it was wonderful not to have your father looking over your shoulder. You could do anything you felt like - you could drink too much, you could make love too much, you could vanish, you could work when you wanted to work. Greenwich Village was the place where I sort of grew up."

      At length, though, he grew restless. In 1953, like others of his age and inclinations, he set out to see America. Working menial jobs and writing notes and poems on paper napkins and the backs of envelopes, he hitchhiked through all 48 states.

      "I had no money and I wanted to see my country," he recalls. "I wanted to convince myself that people sneeze in Alabama the way they sneeze in Torrington. I knew eventually I was going to stop somewhere, probably New York or Connecticut or Maine. I knew that I was going to stop and try to write."

      But even after he came back east, he couldn't seem to get off the road. In 1960, after marrying Nancy Anderson, a social worker, Connellan began a career as a traveling salesman. For 17 years he sold stationery supplies from Maine to Maryland - "a lot of selling and motels and restaurants," as he puts it now. He wrote his poems on the road, rising at 3 a.m.

      "I went to work but I wrote every day," he says. "Sometimes I didn't know what I was doing, but I just did it. I was like a ballplayer who bats a ball in a vacant lot and everybody wonders what he's doing. They wonder. They wonder if he's crazy. One day they let him play in the game. He's been hitting that ball so long that when the guy throws it, he knocks it over the fence and everybody says, 'How did you do that?' Because he got his swing, he got his motion, he knew what he was doing. And he practiced. That's the kind of life I've lived. I wrote poems from 1947 to 1974 before I got my first book."

      Encouraged by William Packard of the New York Quarterly, Connellan published Another Poet in New York in 1975. That volume focuses on the struggles of veterans after World War II. A second book, Crossing America, followed a year later. Earlier, Packard had published Connellan's poem, "The Moon Now Flushed," in the Quarterly. The poem recounted part of what he had seen and felt on the road 20 years earlier. It begins:

Across American the young men were
throwing their
serial numbers away,
and some were sticking
their thumbs out along
the highways hitting
the cities broke.
And always Fry Cook
and Counterman jobs in
the cafeteria chains or
loading freight cars
with empty beer cans at
the American Can Company.
You learned to buy and
carry with you your own
skillet that scrambled eggs
would never stick in, which
could put you out of work,
and a small pot for poached
eggs, your own equipment,
black tie and cummerbund
Meant an immediate meal for you,
meant money now.

      Like Steinbeck, Connellan confers dignity, honor and meaning on the dispossessed. The denizens of Cannery Row are first cousins to Connellan's Knights of the Round Table - the lobsterman, the grunt soldier, the waitress at the diner.

      Emily Grosholz, one of America's highly regarded poets and a professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, is a fan of Connellan's.

      "Conellan writes much better than Charles Bukowski," Grosholz says, "but with unrelenting fierceness fueled by what he has seen of the country's underside."

      "Motel," a selection from Provincetown & Other Poems, shows the poet staying in a luxury motel during a book tour, spending a good deal of his time with the staff.

This is a new one from the most famous luxury chain,
just opened, with a cheap rate to fill
rooms and give staff practice that
succeeds because the help's picked from immigrants.
Cocktail waitress forced to wear outfit that
makes her look stripped, fired if they catch
her chewing or her mouth looking like it's got
anything in it but her tongue.

      Connellan continued to publish and find new admirers - and deal with persistent demons. In his major work, a trilogy called The Clear Blue Lobster Water Country, the main character tries to reconcile with his dead father. The character, Boppledock, is looking for happiness, "to become whole again." Boppledock is also tormented by the prospect of repeating his father's mistakes with his own child.

      Connellan admits to an obsession with the absent father, not an uncommon theme in American literature.

      "I loved my father very much," he says. "He was a very hard man to get along with. He lived in the American Depression. He was a lawyer, and all of a sudden the market crashed and he really couldn't practice law. All of
a sudden his dreams were gone."

      "I had a very hard time dealing with him. He did his best, functionally. I think he gave up on me a long time before I reached manhood. When I told him I wanted to go to New York, he was relieved. He didn't know how to deal with me because I wanted to be a poet. I don't even know how much my father wanted me when I was born. How do you ever know that?"

      "My brother told me the other day that Dad would be proud of me, and I find that hard to accept."

      Perhaps Connellan's own experience helped him resolve to head off that dilemma with his own child.

      "There has never been a time," Connellan's daughter Amy says, "When I didn't know that nothing I could ever do or say would ever make him stop loving me."

      The Clear Blue Lobster Water Country earned Connellan the Shelley Memorial Award in 1982, placing him among the ranks, of fellow Shelley winners Anne Sexton, Robert Penn Warren and e.e. cummings. Ironically, the
publication of his work and his growing fame as a poet came at a difficult time for Connellan; the stationery-supply company he'd represented had gone out of business, and he was left without a regular source of income. He had to scramble for a job.

      "I was out of work at 48 years of age," he recalls, "and I was reduced to sweeping stairs, climbing three flights of stairs on two sides of 21 buildings for $35 a week. I was reduced to substitute teaching for $25 a day."

      It wasn't until one day in 1985, at a graduation exercise in Norwich, that the superintendent of schools noticed a highly regarded poet among the ranks of his substitute teachers. A few well-placed words soon landed him a job as poet-in-residence for the Connecticut state university system. In that post, Connellan works out of an office at Eastern Connecticut State University, lecturing there and at Central in new Britain, Southern in New Haven and Western in Danbury. He has also devised an outreach program for middle schools and high schools, often working one-on-one with difficult students.

      At Torrington Middle School, where students read Connellan's poems about subjects such as garbage trucks with fondness and robust laughter, teacher Rosemary Reynolds credits the poet with introducing the students to creative expression. "It stayed with them all year," Reynolds says of a weeklong visit by Connellan in 1994. "Their writing became much more image filled."

    "Everytime I write a poem now," says 13-year-old Torrington Middle School student Elena Forzani, "I look for an image that is different than anyone else's. I feel freer. I feel I don't have to please anyone else."

      Some critics now mention Connellan in the same breath as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edwin Arlington Robinson, and he has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize.

      "Leo's writing his best work now in his 60's, just like Yeats did," says Sandy Taylor of Willimantic, whose Curbstone Press published Provincetown & Other Poems. "You get those Rambo types who have a big flash and disappear, but Leo's been steady and consistent. The thing that impresses us is that his work remains rooted in the earth and daily life; he reaches out into the community, rather than orbiting in his own ego or writing to
other poets."

      Connellan finds satisfaction in his work, and in the recognition, too.

      "It's an American fantasy to be a movie star or to be Michael Jordan or to be something like that.   But by the time the prizes come, what they mean to you is that maybe someone will hire you because they're reassured."

      "I'm glad I have the Shelley Memorial Award, but it was never the reason that I wrote. If I never get the Pulitzer Prize, I won't stop writing. It would be nice to be honored, and to be acknowledged but what's more important to me at 67 years of age is that I don't have Alzheimer's - God willing, I won't get that. And I still have a wish to write. That's what's really important."

      That, and to know he has finally found acceptance back in Maine, where he started out, where his doubts and his father's doubts disturbed him so deeply all those years ago. In Orono, where he worked on poems with a group of high school football players, they started a Leo Club, complete with T-shirts. This fall, he read at Bowdoin College and College of the Atlantic, in Bar Harbor.

      "The big thing for me about being invited to read in Maine," Connellan says, "is a boy named maybe Young Leo left Maine at 19 to try to become some kind of writer. We have to make a dream to keep ourselves going but you write anyway - not for wealth, not for security, but because you cannot help it. You're a writer, whether anyone else thinks you are. Nobody asked you to be, nobody sent for you, perhaps few car what you do. Only you care, only you. And that's enough.

      "Perhaps if you do it, you do get a job, some notice. I've been lucky enough to have a wonderful wife and daughter and cats, and get invitations to come home and read my work - and that's a lot."

Back to Top