The Secretary Chant

Marge Piercy’s “The Secretary Chant” is a 27-line poem written in free verse and making use of enjambment with punctuation delineating complete sentences spread across the lines. The poem is not divided into stanzas but rather reads as a continuous single stanza.

Piercy opens her poem with a metaphor, “My hips are a desk” (Line 1) that compares the speaker’s body to office furniture and establishes the poem’s structure. Lines 2 and 3 state “From my ears hang / chains of paper clips,” which is not a metaphor but does work to extend the opening metaphor by using office supplies and body parts together to form an image of a woman with earrings made of paper clips. Line 4, “Rubber bands form my hair,” suggests that the speaker’s hair has the texture or appearance of a mess of rubber bands—perhaps coarse and disheveled. Lines 5 and 6 use the convention of the previous lines to provide further imagery comparing a woman to office supplies: “wells of mimeograph ink” and “feet bearing casters” are images evocative of an office environment. The statement “My breasts” in line 5, however, is of note as it makes clear that the speaker of the poem is a woman.

The onomatopoeia in Line 7, “Buzz. Click,” signals a shift in the poem, breaking from the rhythm of the previous lines and imbuing the poem with a more sonically charged experience of the office. Line 8 again starts with the word “[m]y”; here, Piercy begins a series of ruminations about her “head” (Line 8). Line 8 opens this brief series with only the two words, “[m]y head”; this is intentional, as it draws focus to these two words before delving into three separate descriptions of the speaker’s head in the subsequent lines. The head is: “A badly organized file,” “a switchboard / where crossed lines crackle,” and “a wastebasket / of worn ideas” (Lines 9-12). These metaphors suggest the speaker’s mental state to be hazy or flustered, though the lines may be read ironically in light of the metaphors established earlier in the poem.

Lines 14-16 provide the first moment of concrete action within the poem, as “Press my fingers / and in my eyes appear / credit and debit,” leads with a verb and suggests an action and reaction with the speaker’s fingers registering credit and debit within her eyes, similar to how a machine might function. Credit and debit are significant here, referring to finances which not only align with the office theme of the poem but suggest home life or tasks a woman would be expected to undertake in a more traditional role as homemaker. Onomatopoeia again appears in Line 17, “Zing. Tinkle” mirroring the “Buzz. Click” of Line 7 and serving as a break within the poem to provide a moment of pure sound rather than image.

Similar to Lines 14-16, Lines 18-19 make a connection between a specific action and reaction within the body: The speaker’s navel acts as a reject button affecting the function of her mouth. That her mouth issues “canceled reams” (Line 19) metaphorically says something about how the words she speaks are received by those around her. In Line 20, Piercy uses the words “swollen” and “heavy,” which correspond to human pregnancy, but also “rectangular,” which feels out of place in terms of giving birth, though in line with the poem’s convention of relating human traits to those of office equipment. “I am about to be delivered / of a baby / xerox machine” (Lines 21-23) are syntactically jarring. The preposition choice of “of” allows the line “of a baby” to stand on its own and in turn to be doubly read as “I am about to be delivered / of a baby” and “of a baby / xerox machine.” This is a move that allows Piercy to create an overt image of childbirth while adhering to the poem’s extended metaphor.

The closing lines of the poem almost entirely divert from the poem’s earlier established rhythms. “File me under W” is a simple enough statement but it also suggests a sort of sweeping generalization of the speaker in that they might be reduced to something so one-dimensional as to be filed away (Line 24). The choice of alliteration is key, as “once” becomes “wonce” in “because I wonce / was / a woman” (Lines 25-27). The spelling change provides a visual sense of alliteration to pair with the phonetic alliteration of the word once. “Was” stands on its own line as does “a woman,” drawing close attention to these words and, ultimately, the speaker’s changed state (Lines 26-27).

The speaker of Piercy’s poem is both cheeky and fed up. She uses the tools of poetry, specifically metaphor, to express how she is objectified in her office environment. It seems the office in “The Secretary Chant” does not provide the speaker with a respite from traditional gender roles; rather, it amplifies and warps them into something equally undesirable.