Kenny Norton

Author: Kenny Norton

  • Poems Need Story

    I love the Disney parks. There’s something about the immersive theming that resonates with me before any ride or attraction. When anyone walks into a land, they are met with a built-in history and story without even realizing it. Then, each attraction has its own history and theming.

    Take entering into the Magic Kingdom park for example. Out front you see the train station, the giant floral Mickey face staring at you (like the fanfare of a film). Next, you go through a tunnel under the railroad and enter the town square. You leave the real world and walk into a turn-of-the-century town with a city hall, train station, theatre, candy shop and Emporium all in your view. There are tracks for a horse-drawn trolley in the road. Everything points you toward Main Street, and when you round the corner and center yourself on it, the street points to the castle.

    It is all very cinematic on purpose, like the opening shots in a film. The Imagineers were setting a scene and giving the guests a story. It may not be a complete narrative, but that story dominates the scene – a turn-of-the-century town celebrating Independence Day, complete with patriotic bunting on the buildings.

    How does this help me or influence my poetry and writing? Humans respond to story. We need it. Walt Disney understood this intuitively, and his park (and subsequent parks) shows it. It doesn’t even need to be one with a complete beginning, middle and end although many of their rides and attractions do have all three. What they determined is that the attractions need a backstory to set up the scene. That’s what I take into my writing.

    Everything needs a narrative or history behind it. Without it, I can’t find the emotional weight of the piece or the images of the piece. Thinking of my recently published Jekyll Island, it has a story: the speaker visiting the beach with his son and remembering the last time he was there with his wife. That helped me find the emotion and choose the images. I specifically chose the changing of the tide where the beach slowly disappears as the water rises up to the rocky sea wall (as it does there in places). Then, I was able to write the story and the emotion that I wanted it to have once the scene was set.

    Whether it begins mid-scene or at the beginning I want everything I write to have a backstory. Looking back at some of my favorite poems, I see it and why I gravitate to them: “Ozymandias,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “Because I could not stop for Death,” “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died,” “The Raven,” “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and “Birches” to name a few. Each one of these has a narrative to it, some more so than others, but the story drives the images and emotion of the poem.

    For me, I want story to be at the heart of what I write. Does that mean everything needs to be a narrative poem? No. The backstory can still influence the scene, the images and emotion just like Main Street.

  • Publication Announcement

    I am pleased to announce that my poem "Jekyll Island" has been published by Inkhorn Review. 

    While it is not autobiographical, this poem is meaningful to me as it was inspired by a photo my cousin posted on Facebook of her late father, her son as a toddler and herself on the beach at Jekyll Island. 

    I hope you enjoy reading the poem. 

    https://inkhornreview.com/autumn-2026/jekyll-island/

  • The Quiet Influence of Wendell Berry

    After reading about Wendell Berry’s death last night, I pulled out my kindle and began reading him again. To my amazement, I never realized the quiet influence he had on my own writing, and I had never really read him before this year.  

    When I decided that I wanted to seriously write poetry for publication, I asked ChatGPT, “who are four modern poets I should read who can help me develop my voice as a poet.” Berry was one of those (I think I might actually write a series of blogs on my influences).  

    What did I learn from him? It showed up a bit under the radar. My early poems were either songs masquerading as poems or Hallmark-type poems, filled with abstract phrases that sounded really nice to the ear. Once I began ingesting what I was reading, my poems changed.  

    I started to trust my plain language and stopped trying to sound poetic. With that I began to trust the natural pulse of how I phrase language and work it into the poem. I can’t say I am fully there yet as I tend to be afraid my poems are too simple, boring and plain. As I am rereading Berry, I am getting a little more comfortable.  

    While I can’t attribute my comfort in writing about the natural world to him, I think he influenced part of my writing. Much of that aspect comes from my love of the Transcendentalist writers and Romantic poems. However, with Berry, I can see now that my use of a simple piece of nature to carry the weight of a poem comes from him. A simple river. A cotton field. A bird outside the window. All these things have been a central image in my poems and carried the emotional message through it.  

    Most of all I think he is teaching me still. The poem can rest in a single image, a single scene – be restrained. It does not need ornate language to make it powerful, letting the natural scene provide meaning, beauty and power. Then, I can use my little darlings, the abstract Hallmark-like phrases, because they are earned.  

  • Imposter, Fraud and Poet

    Sometimes I feel like a fraud, and I have to get used to that.

    Imposter syndrome might be something ubiquitous, but to me, it feels like I am the only one, especially after the tenth rejection letter in a row while struggling with a difficult revision. But I can’t let it get me down.

    Ultimately, I understand a lot of poems in these first batches were not ready or were not fits for journals. Some were nice poems, but not poems journals publish. They’re the type of poems that live sandwiched between “good” poems in a collection. The thing is, I like those types of poems. I enjoy writing those types of poems. I feel like people like reading those types of poems. But journals do not want to publish them.

    So either I am destined to be a homeless, self-publishing poet, an imposter, or I grow to be a publishing poet. Maybe I am all three.

    I never wanted to be a poet, but it seems to be choosing me. In my teens, I wanted to be a singer-songwriter in coffee shops who might one day write a song for myself or someone else that would make it. When that door slammed, and I became an English teacher, I thought I would write short stories and maybe a novel. But I never had the courage to send out my short stories. I found I started several stories, outlined ideas for a lot more, but I never finished them. I have one that I know exactly where I want it to go, but twelve years later, it is still just 75% complete.

    But turning 50 changed everything. I feared being George Gray. Instead of stories, I started writing lyrics again—not that I ever stopped—but they were coming to me faster, stronger, and feeling more poem-like. So I began trying to write poems and sending them out. At least I am not George Gray anymore.

    But I do feel like a fraud. Am I really a poet? Do I have what it takes? Really, though, my deepest fear is that no one will want to publish what I write. So the imposter voice gets louder every time I get that rejection letter.

    The first few powered me to take a leap. I could see it in my drafts. I was honing in on my craft, getting better. Now, the voice seems to be winning, smashing me under its feet like I am a bug. I don’t know how to recover.

    I guess I do, though, as I keep on writing and revising, wrestling with the revision. Trying to force poems I do like, but I am writing something. If I keep putting words to a blank page, which I have always loved doing, one day it might work. It might not be a song that gets to number one with a bullet, but it could be a quiet little poem in a small literary journal that says: you did it; you don’t have to fear being George Gray anymore.

    The rejection letters make it feel like an unscalable mountain, but I have to keep trying.

    I will also share one of those rejected poems, and rightly so. It is not a journal poem.

    MISSISSIPPI FLIGHT

    She hears a call from the distant West,
    stirring a longing long put to rest.
    Will the willows and fireflies remain
    as the fantasy is unspooled?

    In the wind—
    a fever from the Colorado sky.
    In her breath—
    the freedom of the Mississippi flight.

    Fantasy becomes real, no longer a fairytale—
    to feel the prairie dirt turn to rocky ground,
    longing to hear the silence
    of newly fallen snow.

    (C) 2026 Kenny Norton

  • What Can I Learn from Dolly

    I have never considered myself a huge Dolly Parton fan. I liked many of her songs and always recognized that she was one of our great songwriters. Still, as I have been thinking about her work the past 24 hours, especially while trying to understand my own developing voice as a poet, I keep finding lessons in the way she told stories.

    I am a storyteller at heart. While I admire poets who bend language into something almost abstract, I have a harder time writing that way because I am always looking for the story. Dolly understood story.

    Listening again to songs such as “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors” and “Joshua,” I began thinking about what can I learn from her songwriting as a poet. Dolly once talked about songs needing to paint a picture, an idea that makes sense to me because the songs I remember most usually give me something I can see.

    In “Joshua” she set up place very well. “a good ways down the railroad track / there was this little old rundown shack,” is such a vivid introduction, and I immediately know the place and I know much about the man that lives already.

    Another thing she does well is that she paints a picture of a human emotion, letting that picture draw us into the lyric quickly. In “Jolene,” we do not need several verses explaining jealousy or fear. A woman, afraid she is going to lose the man she loves, pleads directly with another woman. Even the repetition of Jolene’s name creates a tension before we even get into the story. Listen to the pleading: “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.”

    As someone who can take a while getting into a poem, setting everything up so the reader understands exactly where I am going, that is something I need to remember. Sometimes the story can just begin.

    Dolly also understood how much weight an ordinary item can carry. “Coat of Many Colors,” a song about poverty, family and childhood embarrassment, could have simply told us that Dolly grew up poor but surrounded by love. Instead, she gives us the coat, made by her mother from rags. She talks about how that coat became more than a coat to her: a symbol of not just love but a kind of wealth that money couldn’t buy.

    That is something I have been trying to learn in my own poetry, making an object carry emotion and history. When an image is strong enough, I do not have to stop and explain what it means. A river can carry memory. A loose thread can show something beginning to unravel. A bug left on the floor can become part of a neglected relationship.

    When I find myself writing about emotions such as grief, shame, loneliness, heritage or regret, I tend to explain. I will write a poetic moment then explain in a summary verse or two. I am learning to ask what those things actually look like, and ask what is the story there and what emotion can it carry. Dolly trusted the object, like a coat, and let that object carry the emotional weight through the lyrics.

    Perhaps the lesson I need most from Dolly, though, is restraint like I was learning from the community theatre production in another blog post. When her songs work best, the story earns the emotion, and that is something I need to study in her writing.

    “Down from Dover,” one of her darker story songs, hurts because we watch a young woman wait for someone who is not coming. Dolly does not have to stop the story to explain why abandonment is painful. The waiting shows us. This also goes back to how she paints a picture. Think about this line, how much emotion and information it packs: “The Sun behind a cloud just casts the crawling shadow.” A powerful line that tells me everything I need to know about the woman’s emotions and situation.

    That is something I am still learning. Dolly reminds me that sometimes the story’s images already told us the emotion through action…now we are back at that show don’t tell mantra.

    Also, her characters also tend to be people before they become statements about something larger. Although her songs deal with poverty, love, faith and social expectations, she usually starts with someone living through those things. I don’t have to have an elaborate introduction where I twist language so only a college professor can decode it. I can show a simple person living a life in a simple situation and let that situation speak volumes.

    Maybe what encourages me most about Dolly’s songwriting is the plainness of much of her language. She did not need every line to announce itself as poetry. Often the words sound like someone telling you a story on a front porch. The sophistication is underneath. It is in the structure, the images, the repetition, and what she leaves out.

    As I continue working on my own poetry, I sometimes wonder whether my language is too plain or my poems are too narrative, especially when I read poets whose work pushes language in directions that do not come naturally to me.

    What is she teaching me through her writing? I can make the story stronger, choosing the details that matter and cutting the ones that do not. Easier said than done for me, I know. But if I can find the image that carries the emotion instead of explaining it and trust an ordinary object to become something larger, I can learn when to stop explaining and let the reader feel what is already there.

    Rest in peace, Dolly. Thank you for the songs, the stories, and the lessons I am still learning from them.

  • Sometimes, I Need to be A Tree

    You may remember the acting exercise about being a tree. A lot of TV shows like to make light of it. Honestly, I always thought it was a silly exercise until I really began to think about what it asks an actor to do. The secret: it’s not really about being a tree.

    No one can do the exercise without letting go of the fear of looking silly. Once an actor loses those inhibitions, she can become the tree blowing in the wind. She can stop worrying about how she looks and concentrate on what the movement feels like.

    That realization shone another spotlight on writing for me.

    I can’t take my poetry, or even my short fiction, to the level I want it to reach if I am afraid of looking silly or afraid someone might look at me differently because of something I write.

    If I can be vulnerable and put away some of that fear, my writing can become more honest. I can explore emotions and stories at a depth I can’t reach when I am guarded.

    Being vulnerable doesn’t necessarily mean everything I write has to be autobiographical. It does mean I can’t be afraid to draw on my own experiences and emotions. Like the actor pretending to be a tree, I can use what I know and feel as a doorway into someone else’s world. I can enter the mind of a speaker facing a moral conflict or an edgy situation and try to write that experience honestly, even when it makes me or the reader a little uncomfortable.

    That may be part of what good art asks us to do.

    I don’t need everything I write to make some profound statement. But if someone recognizes themselves in something I write and feels seen, or if someone sees the world from another point of view for just a moment, that is the kind of success I hope my writing can have.

    And I don’t think I can get there while protecting myself from looking silly. I just have to be willing to be the tree.

  • Thoughts on Restraint in Writing

    Recently, I watched a community theatre production of a popular musical, and while I am not reviewing shows at this time, my critical eye still influenced my thoughts. As I watched these college-age actors perform, I had a realization—one that helped me understand something about writing.

    During the show, I kept watching the two actors playing the adults, and they had a presence and poise that I did not see in the others. It was restraint. They understood how to stand still and have their whole bodies exude emotion, and how to let their voices carry the line without going over the top. With the younger actors, I kept thinking, Dial it back. You are trying too hard.

    That is when I began to think about my own writing and my developing poetic voice. I keep hearing about restraint—that it separates the hobbyist from the published poet.

    Restraint is also what I struggle with the most. I like to be wordy at times, and I like to explain at times. Like the actors on the stage, I tend to try too hard.

    I don’t trust the images and the words of the poem to carry the thought and the emotion. Instead of being too loud or relying on unnatural facial expressions, I repeat the same idea, use a general phrase that sums up the thought, use competing metaphors, or explain the theme.

    Like an actor’s work onstage, it may come across fine. But to the discerning eye, it will be flawed. My writing could be great for casual readers who are not interested in polished poems and just want to enjoy reading it. (I was going to write like the community theatre audience, but that would be my lack of restraint.)

    But I want to be taken seriously by others in the craft. In theatre terms, I want to be onstage at a regional or Broadway theatre, where the professionals play.

    If I want to better my craft, I need to work on restraint. Just like the adult actors on the stage, I need to be able to tell my truth in a quiet stillness without exaggeration, without trying too hard.

  • Writing Thoughts

    I wanted to write songs as long as I can remember, but as a child I did not want to write love songs (I really did not like them). But as I got older, I began writing lyrics and tried to write music. As fate would have it, songwriting was not for me. So I became an English teacher, who became a digital marketer, and now someone who wants to be a poet. Trouble is - the songwriter likes to make appearances way too often and way too often I really love what the songwriter wrote even though it does not belong in a poem. 

I wrote this draft in response to my frustration with writing and editing out the songwriter. It is a very rough draft.

    I love the sweeping statements of a song
    the directness of the chorus
    the poetry hidden inside.
    Then, they invade my poems,
    the little viruses,
    and they become
    my little darlings
    that I just can’t kill,
    making me sound like an alcoholic
    describing the drink;
    I like the way it sounds,
    how it rolls off my tongue.

    I don’t want to release them
    but I should.
    They are little crutches
    to prop me up,
    make me feel better,
    but do nothing for the poem.
    It truly is hard to let go
    of my version of cocaine.

    (C) 2026 Kenny Norton

  • The Ant – a new poem

    Here is a journal poem that I shared on my Facebook page, and I wanted to share it in the blog.

    THE ANT

    Crawling on the ground, avoiding feet,
    avoiding being squished.

    Crawling on the ground, scaling walls,
    searching for an exit.

    Getting turned around, lost
    on a bench.

    Up is down, and sideways goes up,
    and going straight leads to a gap.

    Alone, small, and determined.

    Powerless, in need of mercy.

    Flicked to the ground
    to start it all over again.

    (C) 2026 Kenny Norton

    black ant on brown wooden surface
    Photo by Erik Karits on Pexels.com