Poetry:
The Mother of all Good Writing
Sunday, September 14, 2025
Time: TBD
Good Shepherd Episcopal Church – free event
Chuck O’Neil, Milford Poet Laureate
Panelists
Moderator:
Professional writers from business journalists to novelists routinely turn to poetry to lift their game. Poetry—with its vivid images, memorable language, and unusual sentence breaks—is the mother of all good writing. A panel on how you can use poetic imagery and technique to lift the writing you do routinely at work and in business.
Audience: Anyone interested in becoming a better everyday writer.
Chuck O'Neil, Milford Poet Laureate
Chuck O’Neil grew up during the 1950s and 60s in Norwich, Connecticut, a mostly working-class city with a rich manufacturing past, where the Yantic and Shetucket flow into the Thames River, which in turn runs east to New London on Long Island Sound.
After graduating from Providence College, where he edited the literary magazine, ‘two roads diverged,’ he says, and rather than go to Ireland for graduate work, he chose ‘the one less traveled by,’ a commune in upstate New York.
Chuck played the drums in a number of bands based in Connecticut and New York over a period of twenty-five years. He continues to write poetry, ever since those early years in college, influenced back then by the likes of Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Galway Kinnell.
He owned an architectural woodworking business for forty-two years, and with Celeste, continues to live in Milford, where he served as president of the Historic Preservation Trust of Pike County, and was a member of the Architectural Review Board. In 2022 he was named the first Poet Laureate of Milford, PA.
Panel member
Panel member bio
Moderator
Moderator bio