Why Write in Form? by Rebecca Hazelton | Poetry Foundation

Of all writing, the discipline in poetry is the most demanding. You have to learn how to distill what you mean into the most economic and at the same time the most elegant and accurate language.

A poet must be the master of simile, metaphor, and form, and of the precise use of vernacular and grammar, implication and innuendo.

It is this mastery of form that the Japanese method of instruction seeks to inculcate. Practice, repetition, and repetition of the repeated with ever increasing intensity are its distinctive features for long stretches of the way.