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.