So this post is a month old, but I figure I’ll add my .02 – I use Scrivener for poetry! I’m still refining the workflow in 2.0, but I’m beginning to work it out.
All the poetry (I tend to write reasonably short poems, no more than a couple dozen lines per piece; if I ever wrote something like Kenneth Koch’s Ko, I doubt this would work) lives in a single .scriv project. There’s only one folder in the Binder, and every poem is a file within that folder; I keep them organized alphabetically by title, but there’s no reason to do that other than my tidiness mania.
If a poem is part of a themed cycle/set/whatever (like, the poetry I wrote for my girlfriend throughout our relationship), I add a Keyword so I can pull them all together easily. (I’m treating Keywords like freeform tags; possibly I should be using Labels instead, but I find the HUD drag-and-drop more to my taste. Plus, the auto-colors are prettier for Keywords. Of such decisions are kingdoms made.)
When I get comfortable with Collections, I suspect that will be how I organize subsets of the whole thing – eg, samples for workshops, manuscripts for editors, and so on – but I’m still trying to wrap my brain around Collections. The solution I used in 1.5 was to create an as-needed folder, move the relevant poems in there, fuss with the order until I was done or the deadline was upon me, compile to .rtf, shove the poems back into their usual places, and go on my merry way. (Yes, I know this is a stupid solution, but perfect, enemy of the good, etc.)
One thing I’m profoundly grateful for, speaking as a poet, in 2.0, is the format-across-files thing; I often zero-draft poetry in emails or in blog comments, and when I used to copy and paste my scribbles into Scrivener, the formatting would be totally inconsistent. And it was a pain in the neck to get them to have all the same spacing, typeface, indentation, and whatnot. I actually gave up and endured the shrieks of my inner neatnik, comforting myself that it would all be pretty and identical when I compiled.
Since each poem is a separate file, the name of the file is the poem’s title, and this is the only project where I have turned on View/Editor/Show titles in Scrivenings. I’m trying to remember what else I changed from the default settings in 2.0, but it’s escaping me; if people want a screenshot, I’m happy to get one.
And now for poking suspiciously at the enjambment in the current piece. Yay, that was a whole ten minutes wasted!