Things I Learned Last Year (2015-16)

Things I Learned Last Year

No matter how long I wait,
freshly painted nails chip.

To truly let my writing flow,
I have to leave my thoughts uncensored.

America is bigger than it seems,
and the North can be frigid
with manners like . . .
wait - there are no manners in the North.

You learn your capabilities
rather fast in certain situations.

Love wins but
hate still lives

The difference between traveling and moving:
when you're traveling, you have a home to go back to
but when you're moving, you have to make
a place, that is clearly just a house, a home.

Back where I used to live
my best friend has befriended
the girl who has taken over my old bedroom.

Reflection: 

Alright, so that was pretty much my year, summarized in a few veeery poetic stanzas, am I right? So, moving on, my year was a lot of self-reflection, because this year, I've had a lot of time to myself. In February, I was told that I was going to move from North Carolina, my home for seven years, to Ohio, a place that was foreign and exotic-sounding to me. If, in fact, you think I was excited, I was not. I was absolutely not excited to move away from anything. A lot of the stanzas (2,3,4 & 6, in fact) are thoughts I've had throughout the whole "moving houses, moving schools" process (which is very hard, by the way, when you've surrounded yourself with 60 people for 7 years and then move to a school with roughly 4000. I don't recommend it). I feel as if I start going into detail about anything, I'm going to get off track, so I'm going to move onto stanzas 1 & 5. Stanza 1 is extremely relatable for all women. I don't even feel like I need to explain that. The fifth stanza is my absolute favorite, the one about love and hate. When you read it, there's a lot of meaning that goes into it and many different ways to interpret it, but at the same time, it's extremely simple.
I discussed a little bit about how certain parts of the poem affected the tone. A lot of it was simple and honest, making it a very simple and honest poem. I didn't really feel like hiding how bad my year was; there was no point for me. So I threw a lot of it there, showing clearly what it was like. I also think the simplicity of it can make it hard-hitting and woah-feeling. I didn't have a specific tone I wanted to convey, but when I sat back down and looked at it, I like how a lot of it had a simple and honest tone.
Things I Learned Last Week by William Stafford is the poem I imitated. It's a funny, thoughtful and sarcastic poem, and I didn't really follow any of those paths (except maybe thoughtful). There's only two main comparisons I can think of. The poem has 7 stanzas, the first two stanzas have 2 lines, the third has 4, the fourth and fifth have 2, the sixth has 4 and the last stanza had 3 lines. I imitated that structure. The other one is that his was a list of scattered thoughts, pretty much like mine. The contrast is that I can't write humor, or anything relatively funny. That's where our poems divert in paths; his has sarcastic, funny humoristic lines to it, whereas my poem is pretty honest, deep and sentimental.

Personal Reading Update!: so far, I have read 10/35 books, and I have about 13 that I want to finish by the end of the month, making 23/35 by the end of January. I've already read one book that was recently published (out of the four I set for myself), and I'm really excited to read more!