Member-only story
Medium Poets: Shift+Enter is Your Friend
A quick way to make your poems look much more natural.
I’ve been catching up on the Medium poetry tag, after being inactive for quite a while — it seems like my poetry brain, my essayist brain, and my novel writing brain are on different wavelengths, and the last few months have been spent in novel-writing mode. It’s really exciting to see a bunch of new people writing and sharing their stuff.
But about half of the stuff I’ve seen has fallen into one of the old traps that have plagued Medium poets: line breaks.
Doing single line breaks on Medium are totally non-intuitive.
Which of course, makes sense. Medium is set up to be friendly to prose essayists, and it does a really good job of that. Unfortunately, when you try to post a poem, if you’re not aware of SHIFT+ENTER, it ends up making your poem really spaced out.
If you use a regular line break (Enter) after each line — or copy and paste a poem, you get this:
Perhaps you are the war I lost,
the love redeemed at any cost,
the lilies on the verge of peace,
the memory of sweet release…
