Hi Colin,
H’m, line and stanza breaks… Interesting questions!
I guess reflecting on what happens is probably better than thinking things 
through abstractly…
and games, when they've been played, are good things to reflect on…

So, a suggestion of a game you could play…
1. Find a poem – one you can call a free-form poem - by a well enough 
established poet, which could have irregular line breaks and possibly 
irregular stanza breaks - a poem you never read before. I guess the easiest 
way is to browse the web and then cut and paste it into your machine.
2. Then, when you've got it on your own machine, save it!
3. But then go through it and make it into one prose paragraph and save 
that!
4. Do this for four or five poems by different people, where each poem has 
different (very different?) line lengths and different places for stanza 
breaks. Actually, it might be more fun to have one or two that have stanzas 
of uniform length in the mix…
5. Leave them for a long enough while to forget what they look like.
6. Then go back to the prose versions and try to reformat them as poems.
7. Compare what you’ve ended up with alongside the originals. Consider if 
and why and where they’re different, and where they’re the same…
(It might be easier to find contemporary poems where lines don't start with 
Capital Letters!)
(If it's a well-published poet you’ve chosen, there's a fair chance they've 
made/crafted a good enough poem to do this with.)
(It might be easier to get someone else to Save it and reformat it – so, if 
you have a good memory, you don’t cheat!)

Playing such a game can be worthwhile. It's where practice becomes a better 
teacher than theory. Playing the game helps one to use one's eyes and ears 
(maybe your inner-ear if you don't say it out loud!) in subtly different 
ways... And it might give a taste of how others have decided to make their 
poem into the shape it has… it can raise all sorts of interesting questions 
about line lengths, stanza breaks, and goodness knows what else! And then, 
when you’ve played with poems you don’t know like that, turn this poem into 
a long prose paragraph and see what appears, what you might want to do… 
Could be fun!

… It might not work over well with the poem below, though, because it feels 
fairly well embedded in its form. But looking at it in this new light could 
still offer suggestions! You might feel the way it starts feels to lengthy 
(so it could be cut!), or bits in the middle are not essential, or some 
sentences sound clumsy – they could become two. Bits might want to appear 
somewhere else. Bits might feel redundant. Some lines may come out short, 
others over long. Some phrases might just feel like padding…Or whatever! Cut 
& Paste, Delete, then let the Enter Key work some magic of its own! It’s a 
way of finding a way of looking at your piece in a new way.

I guess an academic question could be “If a poem turns out to have stanzas 
of 3,5,7,3,7,5,3 lines (or whatever) is it a Free Form Poem or a poem in a 
form that doesn’t have a name?” It has a pattern, a recognisable shape, but 
it’s a shape that hasn’t been used before – and may not get used again.

I guess there’s a lot more to say about writing lines and stanzas in a Free 
Form. So, if I’ve not been writing about what you’re wanting talked about, 
then let’s explore this further! I mean, there's a lot more can be said - 
but I worry I'd merely be telling you what I think rather than thinking 
about how what your asking fits your example.

But back to your poem – and its title! How about focusing on the wind for 
the title (which gets mentioned at the start and near the end). Something 
like “East Kilbride Windscape”  (Why East Kilbride??? Dunno, could be any 
place you decide it to be – it’s just that I always feel East Kilbride to be 
windswept!) or “Where The Wind Touches” – but far better than either of 
those!

Bob

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