Nearly all the information I can find about Standard Manuscript Format for poetry is described in terms of the visual appearance of the page. For stanzas, a space equal to the size of one line of text should occur after each and before the next.
What's the standard for how to create that space, with a word processor? Is it still just two line returns, or is this now preferably done with paragraph styles?
As a general rule-of-thumb, "hitting the Enter key twice" is never the correct answer to any question about formatting text in a word processor.
That action does not add a line space after the current paragraph, it creates an additional (empty) paragraph. If your workflow (or that of your publisher) carries out any automated task on each paragraph, those extra paragraphs will create problems later. To avoid those problems, do not create empty paragraphs.
If you wish to change the visual appearance of a stanza, then the appropriate way is to modify its paragraph style.
For those of us who write and publish poetry this is a serious question. I came looking for 'what do people usually do' because I'm trying to set up a poetry book manuscript in Scrivener. 'Ask your publisher' is a good answer if you have one lined up!
I agree with Fortiter that it makes more sense to make each stanza a paragraph and use paragraph spacing to separate them. I used to do it that way -- but I found that sometimes my stanza breaks got lost in translation, especially on web magazines, so I have gone back to making each line a paragraph and indicating stanza breaks by blank lines, because that, clumsy as it is, makes it absolutely clear what's going on. It's worth remembering that much poetry publishing is done by amateurs with limited typesetting skills.
Another difficulty is that if there are really long lines that create a turnover (ie, wrap onto the following line -- think Walt Whitman!) you will probably want hanging indents for just those lines. The easiest way to to do that is to make the line a paragraph so you can manipulate the left indent and first-line indent.
I have searched the internet high and low for how to do this. I assume the goal is to keep stanzas intact, i.e., keep them from running together at the publishing end of things. An explanation at Formatting a Poetry Manuscript (thanetwriters.com) suggests holding down Shift and pressing Return. This does indeed create a break between two stanzas, and the break is retained even if the text shifts across pages. (Forget their explanation, though; it seems to say the opposite.) So, for a stanza break, hold down Shift and press Return. I'm new to formatting poetry submissions for publication, so hope I have understood the issue and am helping, not hindering.
