I Eat Poetry

Recently, there was a little dust-up over the centering of a poem by Keats. Sadly, the person who originally posted the poem felt obligated to delete the post. I don't know if this was because of the replies or because the poster felt that centering poems is disallowed here. Either way, I'd like to apologize for any lack of clarity.

greatpoets disallows font-queering; centering of poems is allowed if the poem was centered when it was originally published.

Prior to the advent of computerized word processing and publishing, centering text on a page was virtually unheard of, if for no other reason than traditional typesetting processes made it too difficult to accomplish. You might think that is a ridiculous reason not to center those poems now. I (and I suspect others) would argue that when you re-post a poem (which was originally published left-justified) in centered format, you are disrespecting the way the poet intended to be read:

In center-justified text, the left margin is not fixed and so the eye must strain to shift from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. This causes the natural pauses between lines to be extended and can interrupt the flow of the lines (causing them to become more distinct and choppy and disrupting enjambment).

If the poet employs end-rhymes, their effect may be undone by the floating right margin. This is particularly true for slant and eye rhymes.

For these reasons, we recommend left-justification for poems reposted here. There are obvious exceptions, E. E. Cummings experimented with the way lines appeared on the page; Michael McClure (most notably in his Ghost Poems) center-justifies much of his work. Nine times out of ten, however, when you encounter a centered poem on the web, it has been the website owner (not the poet) who chose to format the poem this way.

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If you encounter issues with formatting when you are posting poems to greatpoets, feel free to drop me an e-mail (mehinda[@]livejournal[.]com) and if I am unavailable, the other moderators are willing to help. Some general formatting notes: if you paste a center-justified poem into the rich text editor, you may highlight all the text and click the "Left Justify" button to reformat it. If you need to represent a poem which employs visual caesura (shown as spaces or tabs between words), and you are using the HTML editor, you may use the <pre> </pre> tags (there are other ways to achieve these effects if you're familiar with HTML and style properties).