I work mainly in free verse these days, a style of poetry that has its own subtle structure, but after finishing up my last collection When I Think of My Body as a Horse, I find myself returning to traditional structured forms for the next collection. Why am I returning to structured forms? Because the topics that I am dealing with are difficult to pin down. I’m trying to bring several points in time into the same poem, for example. Working within a structure is almost like using an extra layer of figurative language, it allows me to communicate that concept without being too obvious about it. The structure is able to convey something extra about the content. I find that the people I work with are often afraid of structured forms, but structured forms are just another tool in the poet’s tool box…