Typing poetry in Substack
Use the "More" drop-down menu and select "Poetry"
Substack’s is set up for prose, not poetry. If you are typing a poem, there is too much white space between the lines, and if you want to indent a line, well forget about it.
The answer, of course, is to use the drop-down menu “More” and select “Poetry” and as long as you type in the box it will display like poetry, not prose. Easy-peasy, no problem. Except the first couple of times I looked at that menu, “Poetry” wasn’t there.
If you want to insert a photo or photos inside the poem block, leave a line of white space between lines. Click in the space, click on the image icon (dragging it into the page doesn’t work with the Poetry setting), select your photo or art, and hit return.
I’d recommend setting photos for full width because, according to one source, 59 percent of users rely on their phone app to read Substack.
Of course the first thing I had done was to click on all of the icons and search the drop-down menus. You are just going to have to believe me that Poetry was not on the “More” menu. I checked several times.
Then I searched Reddit for the answer, which informed me of that the old-school trick “Hold down CTL while pressing Enter” line break. That was useful but tedious, but did not solve the problem of lines that needed to be indented.
But the indents weren’t displaying in the way I wrote the original. (I was toggling Draft and Preview to see if it made a difference.)
I finally gave up, created it in Word, turned it into a .PNG, and posted it in that way. (I am going to repost it directly after I am done with this—and making breakfast for the grandkids.)
Then I posted an SOS plea on Substack asking for help, and when I checked a few hours later, a Substack friend had directed me to the “More” menu, and when I looked again, there it was. Honest. But it’s there now and I just posted one of my poems using the “poetry” drop-down and it works! (I even indented the second line, even though I didn’t write it that way, to see if a spacebar indent worked, and it does.)
Happy poetry writing!
-30-
Actually, there was a time when “poetry” disappeared from that menu. I can’t remember the circumstances.
How I would like to indent, or center, text at various times. Can’t be done.
If I were going to add a photo, I’d cut and paste some text in poetry, add the photo, then set up another poetry block.
Sometimes when I follow a poem with with a subhed, it tries to put the whole poem in the headline font. The easiest way to get around this is to add a comment button. Write the subhead, then delete the comment box.