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.

 

EARTHEN SPHERES after John Sloan’s “Dogtown Common” 1916 Celestial Spheres – “… Aristotle proposed that the heavens were literally composed of 55 concentric, crystalline spheres to which celestial objects were attached and which rotated at different velocities with the earth at the center.” [Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester] Boulders bask on Dogtown Common’s sphere aligned as tire treads or a field of asteroids orbiting that avocado pit on the pitcher’s mound. Or is it an eye, a hub, a nucleus or even a navel? On the outer ring of Dogtown Common lie three moai from Easter Island. The one closest has hair an eye, an elongated chin. It’s Snoopy resting on his doghouse roof on his back gazing upward considering the sphere of the sky: a zeppelin stormcloud rolling in violet overhead, blue gray clouds, their dark patches of rain streaming to the sphere of the earth, Gloucester in its wake. What are the chances he’ll get wet? If I’m Snoopy, it’s the brightness and warmth of mid-day to make the most of. It’s not so bad to lie here on Dogtown Common with the asteroids and other moai and that eye, that nub, that nucleus, that avocado pit on the pitcher’s mound, or is it a sombrero?