Marge Piercy’s Secretary Chant

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into her being objectified as a secretary. She was viewed as unworthy of having any actual opinions and value to contribute.

Perhaps the most important image in the poem though, is created with Piercy’s last lines, “File me under W/because I wonce/was/a woman (22-25)”. This is perhaps the most dramatic statement in the entire poem, and it works to solidify our understanding of Piercy’s objectification. With these lines, she is telling us that she no longer regards herself as a woman, but instead, just another object in the office that needs to be sorted out and dealt with. By consciously choosing to add a “w” in front of the word once, Piercy incorporates alliteration as a supporting literary element, with the repeated letter w at the beginning of “wonce(23)”, “was(24)”, and “woman(25)”. This works to put an emphasis on this last line, especially because it’s the only point in the poem in which that feature is used.

I chose to imitate this poem because of how strongly I was able to relate to Piercy. As a teenage female, I’m still working to figure out what my identity is. I have been catcalled on multiple occasions, and during those times, I’ve felt that my identity has been reduced to simply my outer appearance, and my body, as opposed to my personality and likes/dislikes, etc. It’s a hurtful thing to experience, so my pastiche was written as a response.

When imitating this poem, I chose to focus on the imagery and the theme, which I followed very closely. I began my poem in the same fashion that Piercy did, with the line “My hips are but a resting place (1)”. This set the tone for the rest of my poem, by showing that for men, my body is just one more one-night stand, one more set of hips and breasts and lips etc. I am just another girl/woman to rest their eyes on briefly, before moving on to someone else. I then used lines such as “My body is an occupied land/which I have given up rights to (9-10)” and “My lips are strawberries/Sweet and ready to be devoured (19-20)”to convey a complete loss of control, similar to what Piercy did with the line “My head is a badly organized file”. The irony is present in my image because my body and my lips are mine and thus, I should have power over it, and I should be the one making decisions about it. And yet, because my body is viewed as a sexual object by men, that power is completely overridden. I also incorporated irony into the line “My breasts are daisies”, because breasts are associated with sex, which is a very mature thing, and they’re being compared to daisies which are associated with childhood and innocence. I ended my poem with the lines “See me. See me. See me,/For what I am/Because I used/ to be human”. I opted to use repetition and assonance in lieu of alliteration in this section. I didn’t use repetition at any other point in my poem, just like Piercy didn’t use alliteration at any other point in her poem. The effect is the same: there is emphasis placed on my words. Additionally, I used assonance with the repetition of the long u sound in “used” and “human”. Again, the effect is the same.

“Secretary Chant” was written in free verse, with no breaks or stanzas, which allowed me the freedom to play with the length of my imitation as opposed to following the structure line by line. I did, however, pay attention to the caesura in my poem. Piercy’s lines varied between enjambment and end-stopped, so I imitated that. In order to incorporate the element of onomatopoeia, I wrote “My name has become Baby/Sweet Thang. Honey. Mamasita.” In addition, I imitated Piercy’s use of assonance with the repetition of the short i sound, in order to create a sort of flow within my poem, despite the lack of rhyme scheme. I used metaphor/imagery in the same way that Piercy did, comparing various parts of my body to inanimate objects. However, in the peer reading, I was told that my metaphors didn’t have an overarching theme (the objects I compared myself to did not all fit into category such as office supplies, unlike Piercy’s). I think in that sense, my poem is not completely successful as an imitation. That being said, I stuck to a lot of the literary features, and the message of feeling objectified and sexualized, and the result of that being a loss of identity. I think that much is enough to make my poem obviously a pastiche.