Reddit reviews Introduction to Spanish Poetry: A Dual-Language Book (Dover Dual Language Spanish)

It's very impressive that you're teaching yourself, you definitely have a pretty good ear! I think there's a tradition in Spanish poetry for writing in that manner vs being too punctilious about meter and precise syllable count (after all, Spain has a lot of Romances in its poetic tradition and the very lyrical octosyllable is in our collective poetic blood! Even the greats like Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer strayed from strictures often); in that vein, I think you shouldn't agonize too much about formalisms and traditions, but rather use it as a tool to see if they can help bring out something from your work (e.g. if a piece of yours ends up looking like for example a romance, and you feel like conforming a bit more to the form would help its voice be even truer, then you could go for it).

Thanks for explaining your train of thought! I definitely got a sense of that when reading the piece, how things that were once so vivid and intense can fade into mere memories--even people; made me think of people I talked to all the time and now I realized it's been years, I appreciate you exploring this theme!

Hah, not that knowledgeable, just a big ol' nerd and an amateur too! Your work makes me think you've already read some hispanic poets, which is a great start to see what has been done in our language and what's survived the test of time and/or evolved; growing up I read "de todo un poco", like Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Ruben Darío (<3 "Azul...", Darío is for me the most stylistically accomplished latino poet I've read, every single poem in Azul blows my mind), El cantar del mío cid, Federico García Lorca, Mario Benedetti, Jorge Luis Borges, translations of Baudelaire and a few others I forget; not a lot but enough to sit in my subconscious and wake up almost a decade later making me try my hand at writing poetry these days. For a more structured approach though, another user in here recommended me a few resources that I've been already reading through and learning a lot from:

• Introduction to Spanish Poetry, a small sampler of poetry from Spain through the ages.
  
• Spanish Poetry, a dual language anthology.
  
• The Cambridge Introduction to Spanish Poetry.
  
  In the end I think it's pretty much just continuing to train your ear with a wide array of poetry so you pick up things that are effective and that you can execute well, I'm not sure if there's any actual books on prosody like there are for English (e.g. Stephen Fry's "The Ode Less Travelled"), but this little website is actually a treasure of prosodic matters: http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/L/A-Robert.R.Lauer-1/METRIFICATION.html . Again, more as a sample of what could be some more tools you can use instead of something you should be constrained by!