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.