I have been told that a sonnet is written in iambic pentameter, and that my “sonnets” are full of iambs and anapaests, and therefore not sonnets.
Fair comment. I just find that sticking with iambic pentameter seems to force me into an pseudo-elizabethan cant that does not work for me. So I branch out, but still call the poems sonnets, because I like the general structure of a sonnet; I still use five stresses per line, and fourteen lines arranged in more or less one of the traditional structures. Hmmm.