I've been trying to get myself to the point of appreciating free verse for a year or two now. I still don't always get it. Part of the problem for me is that 'free verse' includes a lot of subcategories that are all doing different things.

I'm not sure what all of those things are, but I've recently hit a couple of different authors who write the sort of run-on sentences that smash together ideas that wouldn't normally be connected. Any two or three adjacent words make a partial idea/image that overlaps with words before and after so that nothing completes. At that point, the line breaks actually blur the meaning further and seem to be deployed for that purpose.

Visually speaking, I find each line break almost like a speed bump. I have to slow down in order to stay on the road. Part of what I'm trying to figure out is how to get to the next line reliably because I keep reading line breaks as end points.

I suspect that poetry resembles music in that learning to appreciate an unfamiliar genre is hard because most people doing, say, opera have different assumptions and expectations from those doing gospel or rock and roll but don't have the words to explain the differences.

(I'm on my phone, so please excuse incomplete thoughts. I can only see 2.5 lines of text at a time when I'm commenting.)