[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I have typeset a book of poetry, and the primary advice I would offer is to
create specific styles for your poem titles and verse and use them
consistently.

Assuming that your poems have more than one stanza, give the verse style
some Space After and use line breaks within each stanza.

Do not center-align the style; instead, use a left indent to center the
left-aligned text visually on the average line length. Unless your poems are
more consistent than most, you'll probably have to adjust this manually
(using the left indent slider on the ruler) for each poem; there's just no
way to create a single style that will work for all, and it would be even
more ridiculous to try to create as many styles as you need for the
individual variations, though you might get by with two or three.

If your poems are long enough that you want to start each one on a new page,
format the title style as "Page break before."

Unless your poems are quite long, Author and Book Title are probably the
best choices for your running heads, if any (the poem title could change
practically every page, might omit some titles, and might not offer any more
information than the reader could get by looking at the page). In fact, in
the book I typeset, I omitted running heads entirely because there was a
poem title at the top of every page, and it would have been confusing and
busy to have running heads. I just had a page number at the bottom
(centered).

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

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does anyone have a template for a poetry book...