Because I was a club secretary

This poem is very poignant, human, and beautiful.

I like how you took the speaker's career as a club secretary, dissected the job, recognized and explored dehumanization, and applied this exploration to potentially understand a very real modern-day problem.

You have a rhythm to your poetry that is very nice - you have series of mini-buildups within your separate thoughts, and each thought led to the ultimate climax of the piece. There is a sort of push and pull in your writing which I really like.

Just an example of this:

"How a nebulous cloud
of hot gushing love
and blustering rage
could have been steamrolled
onto paper."

The second and third lines build up the emotions with nice imagery, and these emotions are kind of "steamrolled" down into simple statistics and notes "onto paper". I like how the structure of your poem can be expressed by the content of your poems as well.

I like your sudden change in structure with the "wondering / how / we / sunk / this / low." It makes the reader kind of sink down the page with the poem's meaning.

Each stanza explores a different facet of dehumanization by apathetic printing on paper. In a world where more and more aspects of life and society are controlled by big data, machines, and statistics, remembering and being aware of our humanity is very important. Your poem expresses this well.

Your ending is simultaneously smooth and surprising. After exploring dehumanization from the perspective of a club secretary, which is not necessarily a well-understood and shared perspective, we are suddenly thrust into the everyday tragedies of our modern world. But even then you reveal how the tragedy of gun violence and the monotony of the club secretary job may share a common evil.

This was a really beautiful piece - please, please, please keep writing!!!

Okay, this was hauntingly beautiful and can I just say that I love this? And possibly hug you for writing this? There isn't much to nitpick, so I'll do that and then get into why I like this. Keep in mind, all critism are just suggestions, so feel free to ignore something you disagree with.

First of all, while I really liked this, I don't entirely understand why you chose the title that you did. Is it a piece you thought up while working as club secretary, and doing such work gave you the idea? Is the club secretary the one taking down names and death dates? A title's purpose is to draw the reader in and hint at what a piece might be about, so perhaps choose a different title? Inside jokes are cool and all, but they don't aid in audience understanding unless the intended audience already knows the story behind it. Secondly, while you keep up consistent capitalization and punctuation throughout, you missed capitalizing the first word of the poem.

Now on to what I like- which is a lot. The first thing that struck me was your way of organizing everything on the page, which I liked because it really helped to put emphasis on each portion and idea you were getting across. The second was the last line, which was really thought provoking and a bit of a curve ball. It adds a whole new layer of context to the rest of the poem, which is very clever. The last bit, I think, was how relatable this was to me.This happens all the time in media, and people tend to forget about something once the media stops reporting on it- but it's not over and done with, what happens still matters, especially to loved ones who are left behind. How often do we watch the news, think "at least it isn't anyone I care about" and then disregard the whole thing?

Overall, I really loved this and I wouldn't be surprised to see this in the spotlight.