If you need to use precise formatting, I've always found that indenting the text that I'm formatting preserves the formatting that I use. In pod2html, for example, it wraps that stuff in a <pre> section, I think.

I think you only need to indent it one space; I always like doing about four, but that's just me. So you might try:

Regular POD paragraph...

    {
        blah, blah
        }
        yadda, yadda

Another regular POD paragraph.
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Also remember that POD translators think in terms of "paragraphs", where one paragraph is separated from another by two carriage returns. If you only leave one carriage return between paragraphs, they'll get meshed into the same paragraph. Make sense?