A Villanelle poem using none syllable meter
The Dreamer
Though my dreams, they may never come true,
I am a dreamer, my soul takes flight,
I find solace in what I pursue.

Through starry skies and endless night,
In every night, when I close my eyes,
Though my dreams, they may never come true,

Yet when in my dreams, I visualize,
A new path forms, a different way,
I find solace in what I pursue.

To chase my dreams, a different day.
And so I sleep, with a peaceful mind,
Though my dreams, they may never come true,

Knowing that dreams are never left behind,
In every night, a new dream is born,
I find solace in what I pursue.

Every morning, a new hope shall dawn.
So let me dream, for I shall not tire,
Though my dreams, they may never come true,

The dream may fade yet is never gone.
For in my dreams, I find my desire,
Though my dreams, they may never come true,
I am content, with what I pursue.

Original poem nine syllables
The Dreamer (Vs2)
I am a dreamer, my soul takes flight,
Through starry skies and endless night,
And though my dreams may never come true,
I find solace in what I pursue.

For every night, when I close my eyes,
And when in my dreams, I visualize,
A new path forms, a different way,
To chase my dreams, a different day.

And so I sleep, with a peaceful mind,
Knowing that dreams are never left behind,
For every night, a new dream is born,
And every morning, a new hope dawns.

So let me dream, for I shall not tire,
For in my dreams, I find my desire,
And though my dream may never come true,
I am content, with what I pursue.

In the life of a poet, certain words become old friends—words whose edges we’ve worn smooth through countless revisions, words whose weight we’ve felt shift beneath our fingertips as they pass through different grammatical frames, stanzaic shapes, or sonic patterns. My own practice revolves around this continual return: I take the same subject, often the same lines, and speak them aloud in new voices, at new tempos, from new angles. Over decades, a single poem can become a miniature laboratory in which I explore, experiment, and evolve both language and self.

I play upon the power of repetition. Revisiting a poem I wrote forty years ago may at first feel like opening a dusty box of memories. Yet those familiar words—once crystallized in the syntax and cadence of youth—react in fresh ways when I set them in a different form. A couplet becomes a villanelle; a free‐verse fragment blossoms into a tanka; a strict sonnet loses its iambs and finds new breath in blank verse. Each time, the words themselves remain mostly the same, but their relationships shift: rhyme mirrors meaning, line breaks summon surprise, and meter hides half-uttered truths between stressed and unstressed syllables. The act of repeating words in a new structure is like playing variations on a melody—you learn something new about its hidden harmonies each time it is reworked.

I experiment as inquiry. When I approach a poem as a series of experiments, each draft offers evidence: Does the meaning sharpen if I pare away adjectives? Does the image pulse more vividly when I swap metaphors or rejigger the syntax? The same word—say, “fall”—might first evoke autumn’s melancholy, then later take on the sense of a moral stumble, and in yet another version carry the weight of surrender or of flight. In this way, the laboratory of revision becomes a place of inquiry: testing hypotheses about sound, imagery, and the emotional charge of language.

I explore evolution through constraint. Constraints—from syllable counts to rhyme schemes—can feel like shackles, but I’ve discovered they’re often the very catalysts I need. For a long prose poem, I might impose the discipline of tercets; for a terse thought, I’ll challenge myself with a haiku’s seventeen syllables. By folding an existing poem into a new form, I force its language to do different work: words stretch into unexpected meanings or snap back with renewed concision. Over time, this process adds layers of depth and resonance to both the poem and my own craft.

Wopoli is a living archive. My drafts, I sometimes scan and upload to the site, and my digital drafts online form a living archive of these iterations. I may stumble across a seventeenth‐century flourish mixed with modern slang, or find that a title from decades ago still has more to say in relevance to today. What started as a youthful reflection can transform into something elegiac, defiant, or even redemptive in later life. Each version bears the imprint of the moment in which it was created: the questions I asked then, the fears or hopes that shaped my syntax, or the poetic forms I was eager to master.

I embrace the journey. To explore, experiment, and evolve is to acknowledge that no poem is ever truly finished. Instead, each poem lives in multiple states, each revealing facets of language and self that a single draft could never capture. By re-speaking the same words in different ways, at different times, I honor both the constancy of the subjects I return to and the ever-shifting horizons of my own creative vision. In this ongoing dance of repetition and reinvention, every line remains both familiar and newly alive—proof that poetry’s greatest power lies in its ability to change with us, over and over again.