u/GlitchyRaven_

There's a poem I worked on from October to January. I revised it more than forty times. I workshopped it twice. At various points it was very nearly good. It was always very nearly good.
In February I deleted it. Not because I gave up but because I finally understood what the problem was: I was in love with the original image that sparked the poem, and I had been bending everything around protecting that image even when the poem needed it gone. The image was the seed but it had become a structural problem. And I couldn't cut it.
So I cut the whole poem instead.

A week later I wrote something new that had nothing to do with it consciously, but carried the real feeling I'd been trying to get to for three months. It took four drafts.
Sometimes abandoning a piece isn't failure. Sometimes it's the only way to finish what you were actually trying to write. Has anyone else done this — killed something to find what was underneath it?

There's an assumption in a lot of contemporary poetry spaces that form — sonnets, villanelles, strict meter — is old-fashioned or limiting. That real emotional truth can only come out in free verse. That choosing a structure is somehow less authentic than writing without one.

I think this is backwards. The constraint of form doesn't suppress feeling, it pressurizes it. Some of the most emotionally devastating poems I've read are sonnets precisely because the feeling is fighting the form and winning. That tension is doing work that loose free verse often can't.

I also think there's something worth examining about why free verse became the default in the first place and who benefits from teaching new writers that structure is a cage rather than a tool.

I write in both. But I'm a little tired of having to defend the choice to use form like it's a retrograde political position. Anyone else feel this?

Most of my drafts are kinda bad, not gonna lie. but once in a while something good comes out of it. So yeah, just keep writing anyway