I prefer assonance and internal rhyme to end rhyme. I mean, the sonnet already looks like a box. Best not to get too boxed in, though.
I tend to gravitate toward the realm of superstition (cures and such) and odd scientific facts (like bioluminescent shrimp and fistulated cows). I like the intimacy that I often find in the grotesque.
My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file.
I'm a compulsive enjamber. I'm drawn to half-meanings created by the line, so that's definitely an element of craft that's always on my mind. And I'm a big devotee of the short line, of couplets and tercets, and of irregular stanzas with lots of white space. I've got to give the dense language room to breathe!
I'm very interested in the materiality of language. I wonder if, perhaps, this comes from my background in the visual arts. I was a potter for a number of years and earned a BFA in art before going to graduate school for creative writing.
I tend to view the superstitions or fragments of myth as triggers for lyric inquiry. I also find I think of this kind of language as ars poetica - if we can find the right combination of words, we can make something improbably or extraordinary happen.
I tend to employ braided narrative threads in the lyric, so often echoes (of phrases or images) will occur and will hit my ear so I can shape different resonances and shifts in tone.
Because I love narrative but am more lyrically inclined, I've learned that if I freight titles with narrative information (the who, what, when, where, why of the poem), I can get to my main interest, which is the language, and where it wants to take me. If I can establish the poem's occasion in the title, then so much the better for my freedom to associate.
Many of the poems weave autobiographical elements with fabular or mythic materials.
Many of the poets I most admire have a way of embodying their peculiar obsessions via landscape that can sometimes seem magical.
I think the grotesque can inspire intimacy (it draws us in) as well as awe, like the cabinets of curiosities.
I like to work with multiple sections because they lend themselves to the structure of the poem: its intensifications and arcs and closures. I feel like working with smaller units feels more natural to the way I write poems.
