Burton L. Carlson
About the Poet
I was born in Africa, the son of missionaries, in 1937. I attended primary grades in California, Oregon, and Indiana, high school and college in Indiana. I have a B.A. degree from Wabash College, and B.D. and M.A. degrees from Yale University. I spent a year in Tübingen, Germany, on a Fulbright Scholarship. I attended Wabash on a Sloan Scholarship, and Yale on a Wilson Scholarship and a Danforth Fellowship. I have held government positions with the U.S. Departments of Labor and Education, and State administrative positions in Utah and Colorado. I also worked for the Poverty Program in New Haven, Boston and a number of other cities during the Sixties, the main ones being Greenville, Mississippi; St. Louis, Missouri; Watts, California, and Jacksonville, Florida. I am married and living in Easton, Maryland.
I have been writing poetry since my senior year in college, publishing some seventy or eighty poems in a number of literary magazines in the Sixties and Seventies. During the early years of 2000, I self-published nine small books of poetry listed on this site and available on Amazon. During the Eighties and Nineties, I had no time for the tasks of publishing.
Still, I consider my life work has been writing poetry, and while at times I have thought of myself as a philosopher, ethicist, and theologian, and was in fact a program administrator, I have always been a poet. The hundreds of poems on this website bear this out. The poems are roughly organized under ten general topics areas.
Please remember, my poems are intended to be read out loud. Enjoy!