I know this is super late and I suck, but I have to write anyway!

Reflecting on the shaping of a poet for this week's reading, I was completely engaged by Brian Komei Dempster. "The Pink House in Four Variations" and "The Burning" were two pieces of work from this week that have made one of the biggest impressions on me throughout the entire semester so far. On a more personal note, "The Pink House in Four Variations" struck an even stronger chord in me aside from its apparent chord striking qualities because when I was growing up, there was this pink house located very close to the grade school I attended (my school was a continuation school, so I basically went to the same school and knew the same people from kindergarten until my senior year of high school).

It had a number of stuffed toys sprawled along the yard, the most notable one being a giant stuffed dog inside a doghouse and its windows were always open, no matter what time of day or night it was. This pink house was no more than a block away from my high school, on the way to several fast food places, liquor stores, gas stations, etc. that the kids from school frequented. For as long as I've lived, the owner of the house has been rumored to be a child predator, and it's a rumor that has reached generations of families. I haven't seen this house in years, but upon reading "The Pink House in Four Variations," I was able to recall every single detail about it in a split second.

The title "The Pink House in Four Variations" reminded me of titles of music scores. Looking at it from this perspective brought me to an image of the orchestrated evils depicted in the poem. I saw little silent vignettes of each  personality retelling the same story from their own point of view. Things all known, left unspoken and unchanged.

Writers have a really strange power in being able to send their readers back in time to a place that the writers have no idea even exists. I think this is where the shape of poets really comes into play. Each poet takes on a different shape, but the shape isn't always consistent. The shape takes the form of whatever they need it to be in order to fulfill this power to be able to create a bond with their readers based off of things that they really have no idea about, but certainly have feelings about. As a writer, it's a little scary to think that my work is supposed to be an accurate representation of myself and vice versa, especially when I have to take the content and inspiration of my work into careful consideration. Thinking of these poems as a representation of Dempster's self, is, well, pretty awesome because of how much power his words hold in directing you where to look where we looks, making you feel where he feels.