What to Take and What to Leave

After having poems rejected from a journal that apparently prefers to publish more experimental work, I've started to ponder the progression of my style, now that I'm essentially finished with the M.A. program and about to turn in the final draft of my thesis.
Is my style "traditional" now? Well, not really. It's certainly not formalist, but then it's certainly not experimental, either.

I don't feel that my content was ever compromised in the program, but in a way my style has been molded as a sort of compromise between adherence to forms that don't feel natural to me and a more freewheeling style that is usually frowned on in the program.
So what I tend to write now are free verse poems in couplets, slightly musical, with lines that end on strong words, with regular punctuation. The musicality is something intrinsic to my style, I think; it's the "meter" I hear in my head, and I can't seem to shake it, and I guess that's okay. I love couplets, and they'll probably always be my favorite stanza pattern, but I think I have come to overuse them as a fallback pattern, an old stand-by. The program has taught me never to use irregular stanza lengths, although many published poets do this, sometimes to decent effect. This is something I may start to reconsider.
Dashes are strongly discouraged, and I've reluctantly dropped them for commas, semi-colons, and periods. Sure, too many dashes can be distracting and annoying, but once in a while they're just the thing. So I'm going to probably bring them back, too, little by little.
Ending lines on only strong words (never an article, rarely a pronoun, and reluctantly an unevocative word) is something I hadn't given much thought to before the program, and it's really helped my poems, I think. However, doing it without exception may not always be the best thing for a particular poem.

In the end, though, if I had to go back and choose between a program that was geared toward formalism and one geared toward experimentalism, I'd choose the former. It's easier to teach oneself to break the rules than to follow them. If I wasn't dragged kicking and screaming to sit down, scan a line, and count the feet, I doubt I ever would have. No regrets. It's been a good education. But I think the time's coming to let myself off the leash again, maybe double-indent a couple lines. Nothing too crazy.