The pressure to write in free verse is becoming its own kind of conformity and I think we should talk about 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?