Any job seems to have its ups and downs, but truthfully, being a secretary would be such a boring job to me! Sitting in a desk, filing papers, and answering phone calls all day long would drive me crazy. Marge Piercy's poem "The Secretary Chant" describes the feelings of a female secretary who seems to be so busy with her desk duties, that she is actually turning into office items.
Piercy starts off the poem, "My hips are a desk. From my ears hang chains of paper clips." From this first line, I already got the impression that the author wasn't human-like anymore -- Her body was turning into a desk robot, from head to toe. Instead of earrings, she wore paper clips instead.
The quick words for sound the author uses in this poem shows signs of habit and ritual: buzz, click, zing, tinkle. The female secretary is so used to these noises, they aren't even noises to her anymore -- She is in the working zone, just like a mindless robot who only has one option, and that is to finish her desk duties.
Piercy uses many phrases that show how overworked this female secretary feels, but the one that strikes me the most is: "I am about to be delivered of a baby Xerox machine." The female secretary doesn't even have the joy of childbearing anymore in this poem -- all feminist angles are taken away from her because of being overworked. To make it even clearer that the secretary feels so less like a woman anymore, the author lastly writes: "File me under W because I wonce was a woman." How sad is that? The secretary doesn't even consider herself a human being anymore.
Piercy, I think, is attempting to explain how overworked and unappreciated a lot of secretaries are (especially the one in the poem). She boldly expresses how demeaning this secretary job is to ladies, and how this job of hers makes her feel like she only has one job to do in her life: desk work. She feels so meaningless, that she feels like she can easily be stored away under the W's and be forever forgotten until someone pulls up her file!
I have never wanted a secretary job, but I know a lot of people do actually enjoy desk work. Like I mentioned earlier, I would be bored out of my mind if I had to sit in a chair all day long and work with nothing but paper work. This poem stacks onto my negative feelings about be a secretary. Piercy used a lot of strong metaphors throughout the poem that stood out and stuck to me. I don't want to turn into a robot-like secretary! I am happy being a nurse, and not being stuck in an office space for 8 hours.
