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In Cleveland in the early ‘60’s John Ciardi was giving a talk at John Carroll University. He was doing his famous discussion of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” in which he pointed out that the form of the poem was an interlocking rubaiyat which should have ended by circling back, in the last quatrain, to the first stanza to pick up the main rhyme again. Instead, Ciardi said, Frost broke the form, and in breaking it made the poem a hundredfold more effective than it would otherwise have been had he maintained the requirements of the rubaiyat.
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That's very interesting, Mr. Turco. I think it's good to appreciate form without letting it control us. Sometimes we just need to be bold enough to write outside the box (like coloring outside the lines). I once did that with a double sonnet. Too often, though, my coloring outside the lines is an accidental oversight that doesn't work out, especially with the little french forms.
A belated welcome to you -
Anne