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.

 

THE RUMBLE OF ROCK after John Sloan’s “Dogtown, Ruined Blue Fences” 1916 1 Sunrise spreads light across undulant Dogtown. Underground a train of stegosauri, their plates and humps, backs and tails ruined blue fences. Heads sunk beneath the earth tail tips on top of tiny skulls walnut brains they pass grinding across the pasture a rumble of rock breaking open the day. 2 Fenced in: blue-purple plum dark sides of boulders. Their sunlit white sides. Then white tops of ruined blue fences, dirt road behind zig-zagging through green valley to its brightest patch. Two hills on either side, their greens and blues. One tilled and from the other smoke surfs skyward from morning’s fire in a Gloucester home. Dark grays. The sharpest peak in the mountains’ silhouette. The horizon’s brightest ribbon. The very light pink of store-bought carnations. 3 Through the Dogtown trees and ferns the power of the energy of life expresses itself pulsing upward and outward from the earth’s center. The boulders are full of potential energy. 4 The ruined blue fences of Dogtown aren’t ruined at all. They make a boundary clear, as do the road, valley and horizon. The ruined blue fences form a bow with an arrow from the whitest boulder to the sharpest peak. The ruined blue fences rotate in a rumble of rock, visible teeth of the Wheel of Time turning like clockwork from its hub.