Sign Inventory, Week 6

Poem: “Amusing Our Daughters” by Carolyn Kizer

1. The first line of the poem uses negative uses of the language to represent a positive position.
2. The poem seems to use the recursive image of bundled daughters twice, which perhaps evokes an underlying image of restriction.
3. The semiotics of food and eating shifts within the poem and evokes a domestic act in both cases.
4. The second stanza seems to indicate a static state of being with the repetition of the phrase “nothing happens.”
5. The negation of loss becomes blurred by the static as well as positive language in this piece.
6. The first stanza shifts the context of defining people as a group by being “people one meets, not people one cares for,” “and with my brother poets, go visit you brother,” “Here come your guests!” and “a swarm of strangers.”
7. The poem creates a certain peripheral view of the pastoral in the first and last stanza.
8. The poem seems to portray the daughters in a peripheral and almost systematic way through lines such as “We waken and count our daughters,” and “Nothing occurs, though we are aware you have three daughters who last year had four.”
9. The poem uses negative space created by numbering the subject’s daughters and noting on the missing fourth daughter.
10. The use of the collective in the first stanza seems to connote to a certain strategy where the individual becomes a minute figure.