Carl Carlsen

 

CARL CARLSEN ( 1950 - ) is the site author of the website The Poetry of Places in Essex County. From 1974 through 2011, he taught English at North Shore Community College, and while there, he curated and presented public programs about local poetry in collaboration with The Lynn Museum, The Nahant Historical Society and the Sawyer Free Library in Gloucester. He also developed an interest in oral history, and in 1985, the college published his booklet, Brickyard Stories: A Neighborhood and its Traditions.

In retirement, he continued his work as an oral historian, working with his father to produce Fifty Years on Seven Seas, the story of his maritime career, available on the Norwegian War Sailors website. He also collected, from his mother’s side, They Came Out: Holocaust Diaspora Testimonies of the Lange Family, accessible on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website. After completing these projects, he began work on a sequel to Brickyard Stories. Brickyard Stories 2.0: A Lynn MA Neighborhood Before and After Urban Renewal was self-published in 2021. It’s sold on Amazon and is the capstone of his career as an oral historian.

The three ekphrastic poems on this site were written in response to three paintings of Dogtown done in 1916 by John Sloan, a member of the famous Ashcan School. They were part of the Cape Ann Museum’s exhibition of Sloan’s paintings of Gloucester, 2015’s “Gloucester Days.” Interestingly, the three paintings cover Dogtown over the course of a day. “Dogtown, Ruined Blue Fences” depicts sunrise and inspired “The Rumble of Rock,” “Dogtown Common” spotlights noon and inspired “Earthen Spheres,” and “Evening, Dogtown” showcases dusk and inspired “City of Blue Light.”

Every ekphrastic writer responds to an artwork in their own way, and these three poems make specific reference to particular features of each of the paintings they are about. The poems try to capture the mystique of Dogtown projected by the paintings and use the shapes and colors of each painting as a starting point.

 

CITY OF BLUE LIGHT after John Sloan’s “Evening Dogtown” 1916 In the very front -- red ferns. But it’s the walled city of blue blue rock this moment’s about. Sloan has slabbed blues to the canvas thick and glossy, confident, authoritative, even aggressive a century later. An arrowhead, the head of a horse galloping toward the big round sun sitting on the horizon, the last bright spark on the candle’s wick. This city faces the warmth of the West, bejewels the muted browns and greens blue blue blue: sapphire, topaz, beryl, corundum, tourmaline, kyanite, lapis lazuli. Crayola blues: aquamarine, turquoise, midnight cornflower, cobalt, ultramarine, navy. No wind, a certain active stillness. The time of mosquitoes. The time to catch fish. The rocks hum the entire bandwidth of blue light -- indigo, violet. They are the multitude of Dogtown. In the distance: more blue, sleepy mountains, a tired sky. In between: another city, Gloucester, darkens . . .