I was recently sent a copy of Acumen, and I've been dipping into it whenever I've had a free moment this week. It's a literary journal containing mostly poetry and fairly scholarly interviews and reviews. The poetic forms and the content match, following a loose, freer style that fits modern themes. Some of the poems are in a light vein and some cover eternal subjects, but in the issue I've seen there were no traditional forms or classical subjects. Nonetheless, the poems were written with discipline, displaying self-consciousness without straying into pretentiousness.
    My poetry tends to come out the way it wants to, more or less. I agonise over the rhythms and tinker with the words to find the right ones, but generally I try to retain the shape in which the poem first occurred to me. That is, I rarely set out to write a sonnet or villanelle etc. The first time I attempted to write a sonnet (for a competition) I found it really difficult. While I was wrestling with making the words fit the form I felt the end result would be artificial and stilted. When I read it again after a few days, it didn't seem too bad, and the competition judges must have agreed, because it won second prize. That was 'Eternal Summer' in the Northampton Literature Group competition.
    When I attempt to write traditional poetry, I might not produce great work, but exercising the writing muscles in this way extends my vocabulary and makes my prose leaner–two side benefits that make the effort worthwhile.