Shape as Occupied Space

I originally intended to reflect on multiple authors but after reading this week’s poems the author that caught me most was Dempster. Incredibly, he painted an idea of his self with mostly omniscient narratives that exhibit scarce use of “I”. Dempster’s poem Measure introduces the concept of measuring a life, the uncle’s experience reduced to “48 weeks of radiation,” of “12 hours under the knife” or, essentially, numbers rather than the experience as a whole. The technicality of the numbers become mechanical and thus removes the narrator from the emotional experience of the story. They distract the reader while details such as “half the breath” and “no strategy” are interwoven to create underlying identification of the uncle and narrator. The numerical approach works in such a way that the emotional aspects are subtle, catching the reader at the end with the line that describes “a single pine cone falling,” evoking the loneliness of falling alone and thus the uncle’s plight.  

I think about what it means for a poet to shape themselves and it makes me wonder about what it means to possess ‘shape’. Shape generally refers to the physical form in which a space is occupied, just as the class earlier reflected on what it is to occupy space as a poet. The way the poet shapes themselves, it seems, is heavily dependent on the way they occupy space and thus the form they take in this space. I think Dempster occupies his space through form in both a literal and metaphorical sense—his poems take shape on the page in generally symmetrical stanzas that remove from more expressive techniques and add to the mechanical feel of each poem’s perspective.  

Dempster’s poetry generally examines the lives of others; for example, the mother, son, sister and children are each given a perspective in The Pink House in Four Variations. Here numbers appear again, as a house is divided into four lives, four perspectives from people that should be regarded as wholes but instead appear fractions under the divisive format of the poem. Though Dempster rarely uses “I” or narrates his experiences through more than brief flashes, each reminiscing is enough to provide context to the remainder of his work. The Burning is provides context of childhood trauma, Exposure of sexuality, Measure of loneliness and age, etc. Thus Dempster forges an identity through the collective actions of others and allows the space they occupy to portray his individuality rather than narrating it directly. The shape he assumes is mechanical and objective, but perhaps more identifying than his identity as told through direct language.   

-Casey V