The Secretary Chant By Marge Piercy

The Secretary Chant is a poem written by Marge Piercy. Marge Piercy is a novelist, poet, and social activist. She is also wrote many other poems such as Barbie Doll, To Be Of Use, A Work Of Artifice, and many more. The subject of The Secretary Chant is about a secretary who is exhausted of her career. She is overworked of echoing the same aspects of her job. For every poem Marge Piercy writes, she has a message to the readers. I think the message that she is trying announce is that humans get weary and worn out of repeating phases and that we people are not robots which are accurate and precise all the time. The author uses the attitude of the poem to identify the theme. The attitude is boredom and frustration towards the job of the secretary. An example is “My head is a badly organized file.” This line from the poem shows that she has a lot of things going on and she is bored of it. Repeating the same things daily can be really frustrating and annoy if you’re not in the right state of mind. In addition, “My head is switchboard where. / crossed lines crackle.” This line explains that her head is wired all over the place like a switchboard. Crossed lines crackle meaning that her mind is all over the place …show more content…
The Secretary Chant literally means the secretary repeating phases. For example, “My hips are a desk./ From my ears hang./ chains of paper clips.” These lines explain how rigid she is from all of the daily work. The lines also explain of how she is so overwhelmed that she is becoming one with the office and she literally has papers clips hanging on her ears. In addition, “Swollen, heavy, rectangular./ I am about to be delivered./ of a baby./ Xerox machine,” This line is saying that she is becoming one with her job because she is giving papers like xerox machine. She is losing her mind and repeating the same process again and again. Not everyone can put themselves together and do the same thing