Hi Maryann,
I've been so slammed with teaching that I've just been a "lurker" on this board for a while now, but this is a topic near to my heart so I'm emerging from the shadows....
First off, what Susan said: use the demotic to mask the form, find the "striking voice," characterize by what the speaker says, sometime create distance (i.e. unreliable narrator), and as to the best literary examples, I would agree that Ai's early work, and the Spoon River Anthology, both volumes, are useful, along with Frost's blank verse short stories. Also, some of E.A. Robinson's Tilbury Town poems (famously, "Richard Cory," a first person plural dramatic monologue!) In researching my WWII dramatic monologues I looked to these examples, but also to other genres, such as Thornton Wilder's Our Town and to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio as models for representing the vernacular and having it be seamlessly literary.
My advice: find a phrase that really stands out as authentic speech. In Indiana, for example, they say "I shoulda went" instead of "I should have gone." A Frisian boy from the Dakotas in WWII in Studs Terkel's The Good War talks about running in fear "lickety-kite" past the empty houses of the Japanese who had been arrested and sent to internment camps--not "lickety-split" but "lickety-kite." When I read that phrase I knew I had a poem.
If you want to avoid a formal, literary feel, go heavy on the enjambment, and perhaps allow yourself some slant rhymes or rich consonance instead of true rhymes.
Don't bang the bongos with the meter, either. Look how often Frost will use the double iamb and trochaic substitutions to keep the meter from being doggerel, to keep it "natural" sounding.
I'm sure you know all this, but since you asked....
Be well, and good luck with the project.
Best, Tony
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