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 tec
