First things first, I want you to know that this is a very basic ‘How To’ post but it might just be exactly what you need. I’m writing it because every few weeks I meet someone who wants to post poetry on their site but is frustrated because they can’t produce the layout they want in WordPress. Common complaints are a) the line breaks disappear and/or b) they can’t add in extra spacing. As you probably know, I’ve been publishing poetry over on my poetry site And Other Poems for three years so I’ve had to learn a small amount of computer code in order to this.
The two most useful tips I’ve learned are:
- Use ‘Text’ Editor rather than ‘Visual’ Editor.
- Adding the following HTML code will allow you to add extra line breaks and spacing.
There is more indepth, technical info at WordPress Support – this post for example – but, generally, the above two tips work for me all the time.
In case you’re not clear what I’m talking about, I’ll give you three examples of poems with different layouts.
First, ‘Llandudno’ by Kate Wise.
The cries of seagulls smell of salmon sandwiches.
Tinned. On white; juice-soggy in their teeth-setting silverfoil.
Plastic bag jellyfish sculled the pier’s shadows.
We sat in the morning’s goosepimples,
park-bench thigh-marked, waiting for you to finish your
coffee-and-a-chocolate-biscuit,
in matching turquoise shorts because it was
the Summer.
This is a straightforward layout, text is flush against the left hand margin, there are no stanza breaks or extra spaces between words on the same line. So no computer code needed here.
Next up, ‘Something Understood’ by Edward Doegar.
Be seated. So much silliness. Go in fear
of imperatives. Love,
as much as anything else, as little.
Stop trying to touch
the stained light, it’s not for you. Feel
the wood instead; use
has polished the grain, this is not good,
this is not evil. Wood
is also stained. And so on. Deliver us
from this, from that.
OK, this is a little more complicated as you’ll see that every other line of the poem is indented. Here’s how I created the layout I wanted for this poem using the basic computer code mentioned above. In ‘Text’ Editor, I added the code as many times as I needed to achieve the desired spacing. Once it was right for one line, I copied and pasted the code into the next line to save time.
Be seated. So much silliness. Go in fear
of imperatives. Love,
as much as anything else, as little.
Stop trying to touch
the stained light, it’s not for you. Feel
the wood instead; use
has polished the grain, this is not good,
this is not evil. Wood
is also stained. And so on. Deliver us
from this, from that.
There is probably (of course there must be!) an easier, quicker way to achieve this layout (and if you’d like to share your tips and shortcuts, do please leave a comment below) but I’m a great believer in using what I know to get by. (I have the same approach to language learning).
Lastly, here’s ‘nothing’ by Andrew McMillan, who, as you see, is a poet who tends to use spacing instead of conventional punctuation.
nothing
which is really the sound of everything slowly
if you write poetry and are even passably handsome
my heart will pretend it loves you for a while
all I know is the first empty bed
for weeks the first tea of morning
the man who was scared of paper was papyrophobic
as though making something unpronounceable diminishes it’s horror
the sunset is national politics is local
except when it demands a foreignsand incursion
all I know is the dark street
a doorman with a secret sometimes rain
And here’s the poem with the code I used to achieve this layout
<strong>nothing </strong>
<em>which is really the sound of everything slowly
</em>
if you write poetry and are even passably handsome
my heart will pretend it loves you for a while
all I know is the first empty bed
for weeks the first tea of morning
the man who was scared of paper was papyrophobic
as though making something unpronounceable diminishes it’s horror
the sunset is national politics is local
except when it demands a foreignsand incursion
all I know is the dark street
a doorman with a secret sometimes rain
Hope this is helpful to at least some of you! One other thing I’ve learned to do if I get stuck with any formatting or blogging issue is to type my question into Google. Invariably, someone, somewhere, has encountered the same problem and has been kind enough to leave their solution somewhere on the internet.
As always, please leave any comments or suggestions below.
I find a much easier way which is, in Visual Mode, to add full stops until the indent or space is the right size and then to highlight the dots and choose the colour white for them. This way they won’t be seen when published.
LikeLiked by 10 people
Ingenious! I knew this post would unearth other people’s computer brilliance. Thanks for sharing!
LikeLiked by 3 people
Thanks Josephine for posting about this and Reuben for this really neat idea which has just stopped me going completely crazy formatting a poem for the Rialto’s blog! It’s much easier on Blogger which is what I normally use.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Rishi is a whizz with formatting poetry, as well. Glad this post has been helpful!
LikeLike
This post rescued the poem I posted today. Thank you for the help.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Glad to hear! 🙂
LikeLike
That’s what I’ve been doing, but it’s a frightful pain to do and takes me ages. I shall try Josephine’s way.
LikeLiked by 2 people
It’s always good to have options and to find out what works for you best. 🙂
LikeLike
I think this has changed my life!
Now I can (I think) typeset your poem ( I think )
A
LikeLiked by 2 people
Haha! Really?! Hurrah! 🙂
LikeLike
I don’t think I knew there *was* a text editing button….
LikeLiked by 2 people
I find that hard to believe!
LikeLike
Another way: if you go into HTML editor and add some
tags, you’ll be able to put pre-formatted content between them and it will display exactly as you type it.
LikeLiked by 2 people
For the record, that was <pre></pre> — it didn’t display correctly above. Hope this one does!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks, Martin. I think the WordPress Support document I’ve linked to in my post mentions using preformatting. I have experimented with that in the past but haven’t yet got the hang of it.
LikeLike
Martin’s idea sounds interesting. I must try it. I shall continue with my full stops till then – so quick and easy. I am nor computer genius.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’ve not had many problems, but occasionally my cobweb posts will include some tetchy comment about the way WordPress and Word have minds of their own. Word, in any case, has a habit of sticking wilfully to a set of margins or spaces that you’ve thoyght you’d changed after copying and pasting into a longer document. At the end of the day, though, it beats handwriting when it comes to redrafting. I just say thank you for small mercies. And thank you to Josephine and other inspirational bloggers like Kim Moore and Anthony Wilson. God bless you, every one.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Blessings are always appreciated – thank you 🙂
LikeLike
Thank you, Josephine! This is incredibly helpful! I don’t suppose you have suggestions on how to make a poem’s formatting remain when it shows up in the Reader? Mine are somehow turned into paragraphs…
LikeLiked by 2 people
I know that things seem to have changed since WordPress launched the new Reader. I found that if I set my posts to ‘Summary’ the poems are scrunched up (but only an excerpt of the poem is shown). If I set my posts so that the whole thing is visible in reader, the poem appears as it should. However, I prefer to offer a summary to readers so they might visit my blog. Don’t know if this helps?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I believe I have my posts set to Summary as well, for the exact same reason. Ah well!
LikeLiked by 1 person
If you stay in visual editor we add dashes – then highlight them as white to achieve the desired spacing.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks, Reuben has already mentioned this above. My only query with this is what about stanza breaks? With my method the nbsp; also allows extra spaces between lines.
LikeLike
Sorry did not see the previous comment.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks Josephine. Been meaning to republish my third collection, Fade Street (which Salt took off its list) as an e-book, though I don’t know when I’ll get around to it. I’m dithering, not sure which option to take (Amazon Kindle, Booktango, etc.). Any recommendations?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Hi Mark, Sorry I know nothing about his! I see that Carcanet do e-books – maybe someone in their office would be willing to offer advice? I’m not sure, but I think Colin Will (Scottish poet and publisher) might know something about this too – he has published some e-books, I think. Best of luck with that! – J
LikeLike
Thanks for getting back. I’ll check out the suggestions.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The post and these comments are very helpful thank you. I sometimes incorporate poems in my autism blog and have had some frustrating battles with WordPress. Usually pressing shift-return allows me to control spacing (for line and stanza breaks) but sometimes it doesn’t work (why I don’t know). I resort to discreet punctuation, then, to create space where I need it – whiting these out is genius thank you!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Glad the post is helpful, Elizabeth!
LikeLike
The nerd in me loves the bits of code! Instant experimental poems! (And some useful tips…)
LikeLiked by 2 people
The nerd in me enjoys all this stuff, too!
LikeLike
Many thanks, Josephine, for this useful information on line spacing and layout. I am new to WordPress and find your comments useful for what I want to do – create an anthology or repository for the poems I have been posting on my twitter account @poemtoday. I am at briefpoems on WordPress.
You might be able to help me with a WordPress query. How did you manage that neat right hand side collection of text boxes with the grey background. They look very well on your site. I have a Recent Posts place at the right (but without your grey background.)
What I would like to do is have, as well as the Recent Posts, a group of posts organised under the heading Poets and another grouped under the heading Poems. Do you know if it is possible to have the one post under two titles, one for each group?
Keep up the good work.
Conor Kelly
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Conor, The text boxes on the right are Widgets I added – the way they appear is one feature of the Plane Theme. Best wishes with Brief Poems! – Josephine
LikeLiked by 1 person
Many thanks for your speedy reply.
Conor
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Josephine! While no-breaking spaces and background-coloured characters are ingenious workarounds, the use of the PRE tag is actually easier and more flexible when you consider the possibilities for poetry with CSS (cascading stylesheets). Premium and Business plans on WordPress.com can add their own CSS. I’ve written a piece about formatting and styling poetry which might be of some use. http://seehowsupport.com/wordpress/content-editor/how-to-format-poems-in-wordpress/
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks, George!
LikeLike
Thanks, Josephine. Very helpful.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks for letting me know, Robert!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ve saved this post to my desktop.
LikeLiked by 1 person
[…] is an update of my previous post about formatting poetry in WordPress because someone asked me how to format a prose poem this week […]
LikeLike
Stanza breaks are easy, Josephine. They’re the same as in Notes on Facebook- Cap+Enter for a single line break and Enter for a normal stanza break. I do Cap+Enter repeated as often as you need for longer breaks.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for this informative post. I’d really appreciate it if you could help me with something else, though. Line breaks are working fine now, but when on my homepage, in the post previews, where you just see the first few lines of the poem, the lines are all merged together again, no line breaks at all. One line ends and the next one begins after a space, which makes it look totally chaotic. Thanks!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t know! Maybe ask someone at WordPress? Good luck!
LikeLike
[…] For some, the poetry has to rhyme. Others want the words perform some sort of rhyming math, along the lines of 5-7-5 triplets that haikus do. There are plenty of poetry lovers who elect to break all the rules. It’s been said that one needs to know rules first, but lots of writers consider the learning part too much of a bother. If you want, here’s writer/scholar Brian Geiger’s advice on publishing poetry at WordPress, and author Josephine Corcoran’s on formatting it for WordPress. […]
LikeLike