Poetry hacks for WordPress: Part 1

I love blogging my poetry on WordPress, but it’s set up for prose much more than for poetry.

During my six years working on Wordflower, I’ve developed some workarounds to deal with the layout issues I encounter. I hope they help you display your poems the way you want them. Please add to this with your own hacks in the Comments!

Line spacing/soft breaks
You might have noticed that some poetry on WordPress appears to be double-spaced. This is because when you hit ‘Enter’ or the return button on your keyboard, the WordPress editor treats it as signalling a new paragraph — or stanza. The way I get around this is by using a ‘soft return’ at each line end — until the end of the stanza, when I use a normal, hard return.

A soft return (at least on PC) is done by holding the ‘Shift’ key down while you press ‘Enter’. This hack is also very useful in controlling your poem’s linespacing in Microsoft Word. I use it all the time now.

Punctuation and symbols
There’s currently no simple way that I can find to insert symbols in WordPress (add it please, if you’re reading this, Matt of Automattic … after all, code is poetry, and poetry, code¹). I often prefer typing my drafts in Microsoft Word for the richer functionality, then copying and pasting them across to WordPress or JetPack. For composing or editing poetry directly in WordPress, I have hacks for the symbols I commonly use:

• em (text) dashes — if you use three hyphens – – – but unspaced, they will show up in your post as a joined em (long) dash — (for the nerds: an em dash was originally the same width as the capital M in the font you were using)

• en (span) dashes: use two hyphens, – – but unspaced — (these are good for joining spans of numbers, e.g. 22–25, which is not as useful in poetry, but might be handy if you’re referencing another work; also used when using more than one word as an adjective, e.g. smart quote–hack time)(nerd note: en dash = capital N width)

• if I need or want to use any other symbols (such as accents), I’ll generally open a Word document, insert them into that, then copy and paste them into my blog post

• for a nerdier option, you can also use html codes. This is pretty simple! For example, the code for the é in café is & # 2 3 3 ; (but without the spaces). Click here for one of the many cheat sheets available online.

Thanks to Autumn Fjeld at WordPress for suggesting this post. Please subscribe to stay tuned for Part 2! Cover image is from Pexels Free Photos.

1. Obliquely referencing ‘Beauty is truth, truth, beauty!’ by John Keats. YW.^*
   * You’re welcome. ↩︎