Setting basic poetry in WordPress

It would appear that one thing that Word­Press isn’t nat­u­rally good at is set­ting poetry. The default Word­Press action is that hit­ting Return inserts a line break, which is fine for prose arti­cles but not for poetry, where you want a bunch of lines with hard returns but no space between them.

Leona has this prob­lem all the time in the Poe­sie sec­tion of her own site, The Great Return­ing. One of her prob­lems, of course, is that she writes in Microsoft Word, and the great temp­ta­tion is to sim­ply copy and paste the result into Word­Press. This is prob­a­bly the worst of all pos­si­ble worlds, as Word is noto­ri­ous for bring­ing all man­ner of HTML crap along with it that screws up vir­tu­ally any web site formatting.

If you’re writ­ing direct into Word­Press, the solu­tion is gen­er­ally straight­for­ward (sub­ject to weird­nesses caused by your choice of theme): for blank lines between stan­zas, hit Return; for sim­ple line-breaks, use Shift-Return – they’re essen­tially the equiv­a­lents of “</p>” and “<br />” in HTML respec­tively. But who would write poetry direct into Word­Press? I’m not sure, but most poets I know tweak their copy a good deal more than many jour­nal­ists and prob­a­bly need some­thing a bit more like a word-processor to be con­fi­dent of doing what they require. Cer­tainly the default Word­Press edit win­dow doesn’t show enough lines for proper con­text — you prob­a­bly want to see the entire opus while you’re writ­ing. Do remem­ber though, that in Settings->Writing you can adjust the num­ber of lines vis­i­ble in the window.

My per­sonal pref­er­ence when writ­ing for the Web – what­ever the con­tent, by and large – out­side the web appli­ca­tion itself is to use the sim­plest of text edi­tors (my favourite is Tex­tWran­gler from Bare Bones — but you can equally use TextE­dit on a Mac­in­tosh or Notepad in Win­dows: basi­cally the sim­plest text edi­tor you have) and then copy and paste that.

If you are start­ing from Word, then copy the text out of Word and paste it into the text edi­tor (thus strip­ping any Word non­sense for­mat­ting, but note you will also lose all the text styling too).

Then fix the copy as required so it looks decent (bear in mind you can’t style it, with ital­ics etc yet), copy it out of the text edi­tor and paste it into a new post in WordPress.

But. Before you paste…

Don’t paste it into the “Visual” Edit win­dow – that will add some more for­mat­ting that will screw things up again (you’ll lose all the line-breaks). Instead, click the HTML tab at the top of the edit win­dow, make sure the win­dow is utterly blank, and paste it there. Then go back to the Visual tab and it should look fine. That done, you need to go through the poem and style any text that needs it, adding ital­ics, bold and so on as required.

Even with all the for­mat­ting infor­ma­tion stripped off the text before you bring it in, there may still be some vari­a­tion in the result­ing look due to the Theme you’re using. We’re using The­sis and this doesn’t seem to give much trou­ble. Your mileage may vary.

The above is fine for basic poetry. When it comes to spe­cial for­mat­ting, start­ing lines in odd places and cre­at­ing shapes out of the text, I think I would prob­a­bly con­sider set­ting it in Word (or what­ever) and then tak­ing a screen shot of it and insert­ing it as a graphic — which is a dread­ful workaround, frankly. There must be a bet­ter way. Any­one got some bet­ter ideas?