I write the occasional villanelle, but I can't say I've been entirely successful with any of them. From my own observations, it requires an obsessive topic to work well -- only a different kind of obsessiveness than for a sestina. Certain kinds of love poetry or, oddly, philosophical speculations seem ideal for the form -- topics that want things to be restated, rather than returned to in a different form as with a sestina. Also in contrast to sestinas, it is very hard to get any sort of narrative going, whereas sestinas seem to work particularly well for stories of the exact right size for the shape.

I think I prefer sonnets, as more flexible for my purposes.

---L.