James Franco, Poet

If you were alive in 1985 and happened to buy Eddie Murphy’s album “How Could It Be” (featuring the hit single “Party All the Time”), then you may have asked yourself — in addition to wondering what shape of Band-Aid is best suited to the human ear — why it is that artists who are vastly successful in one genre feel the need to dabble in another. Because they do, a lot. Sometimes it’s just the case that they happen to be very good at more than one thing (by all accounts, Steve Martin is a genuinely excellent banjo player). But often there seems to be something else going on.

Nor is this a recent phenomenon. In his 1855 poem “One Word More,” Robert Browning suggested that creative sensibilities are drawn to “art alien to the artist’s” because branching out lets a person “be the man and leave the artist, / Gain the man’s joy, miss the artist’s sorrow.” He meant that the more we master the techniques of our native art, the more our art becomes an expression of those techniques rather than a portal on our individuality. The more fluent we become, the more we become armored in that fluency. The issue is further complicated because arts differ in more than their formal elements; they also occupy different areas of the culture. So what happens when the genre-switch is not merely between forms, but between practices that stand in relation to each other as, say, professional football stands in relation to professional badminton?

DIRECTING HERBERT WHITE: Poems (Graywolf, paper, $15) is a new book by James Franco, the Oscar-nominated actor, former Oscar host and all-around celebrity. That he would put out a book of poems with a respected press isn’t groundbreaking — Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins published a collection called “Blinking With Fists” with Faber & Faber in 2004, an act for which we will all surely pay when great Cthulhu rises. But what’s different about Franco’s book is that it doesn’t obviously represent a cash grab by the publisher or an ego trip by the artist. The blurbs accompanying this collection are from actual poets — Tony Hoagland, Frank Bidart — as opposed to the expected gaggle of hanger-arounders. And Graywolf, while one of the best publishers of American poetry, is probably not in a position to pay Franco an enormous advance or put him in front of the Oprah audience. This book is intended for real poetry readers, all five of them, as well as Franco’s Twitter followers, all 2.2 million.

But is it, you may be wondering, good? No. But neither is it entirely bad. “Directing Herbert White” is the sort of collection written by reasonably talented M.F.A. students in hundreds of M.F.A. programs stretching from sea to shining sea. Which is perhaps not surprising, since Franco actually has an M.F.A. in poetry. I’m obliged here to note that this actor is well acquainted with the educational system, having apparently attended graduate programs at Yale, Columbia, New York University, Brooklyn College, Warren Wilson College, the Rhode Island School of Design, Le Cordon Bleu, Quantico, Hogwarts (Ravenclaw), the Vaganova School of Russian Ballet and the Jedi Academy.

But for all his inclination to wander — a Google search for “James Franco” and “dilettante” returns some 20,000 hits — his interest in poetry is genuine. “Directing Herbert White” is divided into seven sections (two of them riff on Smiths songs), and the poems are uniformly written in the kind of flat, prosy free verse that has dominated American poetry for ages (typical line: “New Orleans Square is my favorite part of Disneyland”), with stanzas that aren’t so much stanzas as elongated paragraphs. Franco takes his title from a Bidart poem that he turned into a short film in 2010, but this book’s preoccupations exist far from the usual terrain of contemporary poetry: “Lindsay” is the Lohan; there are elegies for people more famous than anyone you’ve ever met; and the movie business is discussed with convincing first-person authority (“It’s fun to react. It may be less / Intrusive, doing long takes . . . ”).

As with most first-book poets, the farther Franco gets from himself, the better his work tends to be. The best poems here are six “film sonnets,” in which you can sense the cagey intelligence that emerges in his acting. Here is the beginning of “Film Sonnet 2,” which is about Fellini’s “8 1/2”:

Marcello is fatigued. A passive-aggressive genius,
A man wrapped in himself: art, mistress, and wife.
He goes to the spa, why? At the spa, people in white
Walk about the plaza, there is a fountain, everyone is rich.

The poem ends:

Fellini’s getting old, inspiration dries up, but here,
This despair is nice because it is the sorrow of an artist.
An important artist has important despair, and everything
He does can go on the screen: sex, religion, fear.
A confession of pain and proclivities.

“This despair is nice”: The tone is neatly judged. Franco writes similarly well in poems like “Hello” and “Editing,” and you find yourself wishing the sensibility here pervaded the book.

It doesn’t, unfortunately. Franco has a decent ear for speech, but a bad sense of the poetic line (“And my nose was a blob”). He’s prone to phrases that sound good at first but collapse under scrutiny (“Webbed by a nexus of stone walkways”). Some of the writing is almost aggressively lazy: “There is one of two things that happen,” one poem begins, practically begging for an editor to excise “There is” and “that” (and to change “happen” to “happens”). Many poems rocket past sincerity and plunge straight into sentimentality; others demonstrate a self-disgust more interesting to the author than the reader.

So Franco is never going to be Wallace Stevens — or Cathy Park Hong or A. E. Stallings or Devin Johnston, for that matter. But most writers won’t be. His work is a fair representation of a certain strand in contemporary poetry, and there’s no shame in that. God knows he can write circles around Billy Corgan. To say this, though, is to ignore the larger issue, which is the grand-piano-in-a-bathtub impact of Franco’s celebrity in an art form notably short on figures recognizable to anyone who doesn’t subscribe to Ploughshares. This book wouldn’t be published by Graywolf (I hope) if James Franco weren’t “James Franco.” James Franco wouldn’t be doing events with Frank Bidart if he weren’t “James Franco.” For that matter, James Franco wouldn’t be getting reviewed right now if he weren’t “James Franco.” In fact, if James Franco were just another M.F.A. student struggling to catch the attention of the two part-time employees of Origami Arthropod Press, he’d probably be reading this piece and fuming about all the attention being given, yet again, to James Franco.

It’s easy to sympathize, even if one suspects some of the complainers are no better at writing poems than Franco is. Yet the annoyance this collection will inspire is rooted in a deeper anxiety: The attention commanded by James Franco’s poetry has everything to do with “James Franco” and almost nothing to do with poetry. And that cultural wealth is not transferable. Attention withheld from Franco’s poems will not instantly devolve upon some worthy but obscure poet; it will go to another actor, or singer, or commercial nonfiction writer, or memoirist — or even to James Franco in his novel-writing incarnation. Poetry is the weak sister of its sibling arts, alternately ignored and swaddled like a 19th-century invalid, and that will change only by means of a long, tedious and possibly futile effort at persuasion. Perhaps it’s a blessing to have James Franco on one’s side in that struggle.