Anne Sexton refers to her poem as "kind of a spoof" because she means for it to exaggerate and really personify modern human life - and it's inevitable reboot.
Her voice truly illustrates this idea of her poem being a spoof. In the first stanza, she reads the specific and simple facts with a dry, autonomous, almost machine-like tone. "Two male Ph.D.'s... one hundred/carefully counted insects... exactly fifty fish creatures... twenty bars of food... fourteen white rats... etc." The audience can really feel the mechanization Sexton's put in this stanza. There are no elaborate, beautiful, vibrant descriptions. It's all short, to-the-point, simple facts.
In the next stanza, Sexton moves away from this mechanization to a more sarcastic and descriptive voice. You can here this change when she says "VENUS IS GREEN." Her voice rises and sounds almost optimistic. Then, as human civilization enters the scene, her voice turns sarcastic and almost cunning. "[T]he loud earth tellers spent/all fifteen minutes on it,/even shortened their weather forecast."
Later we see Sexton's voice change to back to mechanization. Yet even with such a dry voice, her descriptions are vibrant. She describes the animals, not by their number or condition, but rather by their actions, their emotions, their very life. We can see "the happy rats spe[e]d\speed through integrated forests." We can watch the "bees swarm the air\letting a warm pollen slide\from their wings." Sexton gives more life to the animals than the entire human race.
Sarcasm and exaggeration are at the center of spoofs. They both poke fun at reality. Through both her voice and her diction, Sexton created dystopian spoof of sorts. Where humanity has become machine, devoid of any true appreciation for life, and the machine has turned on itself, leaving a small speck of life on another planet.
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