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| Poet James Franco |
Many people agree that James Franco is a fine actor... but poet? Critic Dennis has strong reservations...
Straight
James/ Gay James
Poems
by James Franco
Hansen
Publishing Group, LLC
East
Brunswick, NJ
http://hansenpublishing.com
ISBN:
978-1-60182-262-8
58
Pages
$12.00
Review
by Dennis Daly
Some
purist reviewers of poetry posit the importance of their
responsibility as gatekeepers. I don’t see it that way. My
critiques tend toward books that I like either in whole or in part.
But … but there are limits. My button gets pushed by elitist
practitioners of award winning drivel or wannabe celebrities
showcasing their narcissism by caricaturing the artistic tradition
they pretend to comprehend. The subject of this review is an example
of the latter.
Two
for two. James Franco’s new collection of poetry, Straight James/
Gay James, follows on the heels of his debut disaster in the same
genre entitled Directing Herbert White. Both books exercise a
self-indulgent and presumptuous posture unrivaled by anything this
writer has perused since the fourth grade assignments of Sister
Therese Immaculata were corrected and passed back for peer review.
Petulant children of whatever age crave attention.
However,
Straight James / Gay James goes one step further than its predecessor
book in promoting the apotheosis of the sputtering, unapologetic
cliché. From the opening poem, Dumbo, Franco rehashes long-suffering
dead metaphors, blathering on into moments of unintended irony.
Franco’s Dumbo drips down the page in numbingly expected ways. The
poet’s young persona suffers shyness and alienation (How
devastating and singular that must have been!) and then proceeds to
associate with metaphoric circus clowns. Did you know that clowns
were malevolent persons under their painted merriment? Of course not.
Consider these lines in the heart of the piece,
Isolation
followed me
And
the only recourse
Was
to drink hard with the clowns
Pink
elephants
Paraded
and sloshed
Through
my youth
Until
I became a sinister clown,
With
a smile painted
Walt
Disney must be cringing in his grave. I’ll spare you the poet’s
last few lines which are gag-inducing.
Franco
gushes out a description of his sinister, but well-meaning, self in
his poem Custom Hotel. He apparently stays at this hotel,
conveniently located near the LAX airport, once a week as he travels
to parts unknown in order to quench the demands of inquiring cameras.
Accommodating the egotism of this actor/ writer cannot be easy. The
hotel provides Franco the same room, numbered 1212 for each stay. Get
the binary significance in sync with the collection’s title? I
thought so. The piece goes on to chronicle Franco’s penchant for
deflowering sweet little things, all the while instilling in them his
own vast acting knowledge and sinister (yet oh so sensitive) overall
wisdom. Here the poet cites his beneficence embedded in wickedness,
And
then I step out of the screen
And
take them in their petrified awe.
I
take the wise ones too,
But
they are of my coven.
I
know my own Satanic strength,
And
I check it with good will,
Giving
back the charity of my experience,
Growing
little actor gardens …
In
the piece Twenty-Year Chip Franco details the drunken driving
accident that caused his turn to temperance. Nothing much here. No
drama. No lyrics. No images. No twists. No turns. The poet explains,
On
Middlefield Road, and a car
Slammed
into our front,
Spinning
the Accord
I
chose to drive away,
First
a side street
—letting
Beau out—
And
then a roundabout way
Back
home, where
The
cops were waiting.
Okay,
so what? Franco presses forward educating his readers on his bright
future, that is, in comparison with his teenage drinking buddies—one
of whom killed himself by jumping off a parking garage roof. The
poet’s use of the phrase, “I chose” in the above selection
seems odd. Franco’s acceptance of responsibility may ring true at a
twelve step program but does nothing to portray the rebellious nature
of his persona that he obviously seeks to establish. Quite the
contrary. The writer comes across as compliant and smug.
Epic and
uninteresting self-absorption poses and preens itself throughout
Straight James/ Gay James, Franco’s title piece. This tedious
production, pretending to be an insightful investigation into
Franco’s selfhood and gender identification, goes on for nine
pages. It’s structured as an interview with Franco’s straight
alter-ego interviewing his gay alter-ego and vice versa. It also
includes two embedded, very forgettable stanza-poems. Aside from a
few sexually-worded quips (even these seem non-subversive and
ho-hum), apparently interjected for their shock value, there seems to
be no real focus to these dangling passages. One section did
momentarily grab my attention because of its group-think
generalizations and naiveté. Straight James puts it this way,
Sure.
I teach to stop thinking about myself for a bit. But also
because
I find the classroom to be a very pure place, largely un-
affected
by the business world. I like people who still dream big,
who
are consumed by their work. And that’s how most students
in
MFA programs are.
I
guess Franco would know. He has five MFAs.
The
great critic Yvor Winters argued the importance of the complementary
relationship between concept and feeling in poems. Franco borrows his
own concepts by utilizing meaningless clichés. Additionally, his
stock, off-the-shelf feelings summon only uncharged limp responses
from befuddled readers. The sad truth is that Franco’s words do not
rise to the level of poetry, nor even publishable prose.
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