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.

Why Revise

Just found this line scribbled last March, and it seems apropos for thesis season:

The better the poems are, the more they will feel like art rather than raw grief, which is no doubt what they are, dressed up and taught to talk nice.
Nobody wants to see raw grief, but if it can hold a fork right, tell a few jokes, possibly...

Even Poets Have to Grow Up Sometime

When I was younger I used to write poems that used the word "fuck," just to prove that I knew what it meant.
And write about drugs I had never used (and never likely will) as well as ones I had, and about Lacanian psychology and esoteric critical paradigms.
Now that I've been writing for a while, and reading for a while, I've learned to relax and write (not always, but often) with everyday words, on everyday things.
With much better results, too, but that's in part due to age and practice, as much as the subject matter. I'm sure I'll find a home in some poem for the "F" word again, some day, some way, as well as a stray paradigm or two.
Like everything else in life, writing doesn't get simpler; it just gets a little easier.

Poetry and Ghosts

I was just thinking about ghosts and how they can only communicate through sound, and not through any of the other senses. Poetry, likewise, was originally exclusively oral, and only recently has become a visual phenomenon. The ancient sort of chanting verse was closer to music in giving off vibrations that approach the tactile. (The deaf can dance to music, even though they can't hear it, because they can feel it.)
Does this mean hearing is our crudest sense, since it's permitted to ghosts, who are, according to most conceptions of earthbound, once-mortal spirits, damned? And hence no doubt stripped of their most valued privileges?
Such musing doesn't discourage me from poetry, since, after all, I don't literally believe in ghosts, of course. It just makes me want to work harder at making my poems seen, felt, smelled, tasted.
That was always the most evocative realm of the Tibetan Wheel of Life to me, the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. Since they have no stomachs, what are they hungry for? Expression, of course. Connection. An audience. Even hunger itself. Poets all, perhaps.