Poem excerpt formatting question

In your manuscript, you are trying to tell the acquiring editor what is going on. That's all. So you can use Italics or underlining or a new font -- anything that will signal to the editor that these words are different from the text that follows.

The publishing house will have its own way to handle start-of-chapter excerpts in the published book. You don't have to try to guess what they're going to do.

Good move to make all your song lyrics public domain. That can be tricky, if they're not.

Look up how others have done it, especially books published by the publisher you want to send the query to.

:editor's hat on:

Just use italics and indent so it looks set apart from the rest of the narrative. Double-space as usual.

Put in # # # so I know there's a space between it and the main stuff.

Each house will have its own style, you need only give a few visual cues so they know to do this. Include a note on the style sheet that goes with your finished manuscript. (The style sheet has the correct spelling of all proper names, foreign words, and made-up terms, etc.)

Unless they're in the public domain make danged sure you have permission from the original copyright holder to use those lyrics or that poem! You may have to pay for it, too.

I still get stuff strewn with lyrics that have to be blue-penciled out because the writer had no permission or was unable to afford to pay.

The lyric thing has a vogue with fan fiction writers, but when you turn pro you have to pay attention to copyrights belonging to others.

Just so you know, it's not the publisher's job to check on that, it's on the writer!