Storytelling in Film and Lessons for Poetry

At TED, Andrew Stanton, who was involved with Pixar’s Toy Story and Wall-E, spoke on the clues to a great story.

“Storytelling is joke telling. It’s knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you’re saying from the first sentence to the last is leading to a singular goal and ideally confirms some truth that deepens our understanding of who we are as human beings.”

How many times in workshops do people plop a poem down and say, ideas? fix it? but can’t answer what issues they see of what to be addressed and where they want it to go so people worry punctuation without getting into the deep structure of what the poem is saying and where it could be going and why.
Poetry can be story, exploring language or ideas or sound, perception, shape and pattern. Shape and pattern can be a kind of storytelling comedy too. The pattern appearing and then shifting is a surprise that is comedic.
Can language be excised from poetry entirely? Asemic poetry does. Does it cross over to art there? What about when sound poetry uses the body, not just larynx but popping cheeks and clapping as part of the rythm and pattern structure, is it music not language? Is it both? Sound poetry is using word or phrase or phonemes as instruments and making that into the word art. Can we say it means? Can we say poetry that plays in cracks between language, the clever or the sever of word from “meaning” with no plotline is meaning? Meaning is oblique, plural, not singular. Does it confirm a truth about the world and people. Would the body answer yes or no? Unease or comfort? Surely poetry and storytelling can work to create threat, disturb and provoke as much as reassure, comfort and unify. It’s not the structure but what you do with it.
If one is going to go within poetry towards comedy or storytelling, why keep it as poetry? What do the words call for for form? One can cross-pollinate, gain techniques of timing and reveal, learn to sway a crowd, go totally Carnegie to win friends and influence people.
Getting back to Stanton, he says, the opening of a story is “making a promise that this story will be worth your time”.
That promising, to me, is the importance of a good title and opening line in poetry.
If a poem is going to piffle off and leave me unsatisfied at least it will do it and I’ll be onto something else within a few lines or few pages. Novels I may commit hours to find out the author has not kept up his or her promise.
I’m an easily offended reader, an egocentric reader. If an author isn’t putting the time into constructing something, conceiving and planning something for a reader, then the use of the poem as poet communicating with self is done and doesn’t need me for the process. I can go to where a dialogue is structured as possible within the monologue.
(Which bring to mind the question at the last AB Series, if you state yourself by format as lecture authority, there’s no clue that you too are questioning and wanting dialogue or are in a state of changing your mind. Tricky this, thinking akey, writing about writing being punchy without being verbose.)
A first line has to prove to me that there’s craft – it isn’t just a clever capering quip or another blurt that is as formless as riffing conversation in a chat. If it is flat and the rest of the poem is good, I’ll never know what I missed. I give more latitude orally and when there is less white space on the page, or if known to be a newbie or if the context is casual not Poetry. But call up the word poetry and my bias kicks in. If I read on it may be one eye shut and wincing in apprehension. The opener sets the tone and the setting. It shows the calibration of language compression.
A poem has to hook me in the first phrase or line. Every line should be equally taut, or as Marcus McCann phrases it “each line is load bearing.” You can open the poem or book anywhere and not find a sour or flat note. It works in isolation and in concert.
I may never get to the first line if the title doesn’t pass with its promise of a well-made story.
If the poem is entitled “My Scream” we know a huge amount of what to expect of the skill of the poem that follows, perhaps all you need to know about the level of control and storytelling persona. A title of “You’re now talking to the Sleepy’s Mattress Employee of the Month.” gives a different expectation of the writer’s interest in and capacity for engaging the audience.
In a way, it’s good that learning to make a promising title is not a first skill acquired in poetry. It makes the title a useful telltale. To do great titles off the bat would be like learning the physical arts of self-defence before you learn the mental discipline. It would set the encounter up for a bad scenario. But then, if you learn first stance and then blow it in line 1, who looks like the fool?
Stanton says, “The greatest story commandment: Make me care.”
The start of each poem is a start of a relationship. Even if the start looks hard to parse, if there’s a logic in the randomness, some sort of internal coherance, the reader may come along for the ride and appreciate it at the end instead of being distressed at wasting time and getting nothing.
Make me care is an obstacle can be for poems that are from the head or from non-emotion, ones that aren’t linear or essay-structured, that are conceptual or visual. The point of entry for caring matters.
In a poetry world of tmi gambits for attention, maudlin operas in overdrive of set phrase autobahn, shock rock onto the tidy wide-margined page, intellectual poems and less meaning-centric poems are enough. A relief. Once you consume enough of poems that eschew storytelling, list poems of academic language, pretty obscure words without a direction or point eventually discernible, it just becomes an alternate tyranny.
Andrew Stanton gave a variation of the “show don’t tell” that some seem to find opaque: “Don’t give [the audience] 4; give them 2 + 2.” The elements you provide in what order hold your attention. If the poem has no clear thruline or point, if there is only one point repeated as a list of reinforcing points of a narrow confine, either way interest withers. Redundancy has to be for a reason not just because the second way is also a pleasing phrasing. If as an audience, you know only one possible conclusion, you are waiting for it not anticipating exactly. “Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.”
Poems aren’t riddled with the same traps are stories, of needing a narrator who realizes what he or she needs, a call of community, a love song, a villain, the conflict and resolution. But it has its own pitfalls of being predictable, or too random with continuity errors, creating a cliché arc of what satisfied readers, an arc concluding with the summary couplet referencing the cosmic or opening up to the pat universally meaningful. The “razor cut” endings of poems where the final couplet is only sharp part of the poem could be culled and stacked or remixed into an even density of things said, rather than things leading to something being said.
There are many routes and no map to the sure way to hook a reader. The field is open and you may have to not so much put 2 and 2 together as consider putting an array of numbers for people to sum as the order of reveal is more accumulative. Think of Rachel Zolf’s poem where she reads out a long list of names and then a long list of numbers and at some point you realize what she’s doing. She’s reading a list of Arabic and Jewish first names and the ages of death. She achieves the commandment of story and does so without a single preposition, article, adjective, adverb or verb. By using time and reveal over time it converts from noise to signal.
Stanton talks about finding the spine of a character, the overriding motivation that drives the character. It gives a thread of continuity to the work that gives it a compelling logic. Stanton extended from understanding the built character to the self. Instead of working against your own energies, “a major threshold is passed when you mature enough to acknowledge what drives you, and to take the wheel and steer it.”