Debut Poetry Collection Coming From James Franco

 

By Samantha R. Selman

 

Perhaps the only way that James Franco could surprise us now with his unpredictable creative pursuits is if he simply chucked them all to spend more time splitting rocks at his local quarry. And yet Mr. Franco, the artist, author and actor (whose films include “Milk” and “127 Hours”), continues to add to his eclectic résumé, announcing plans on Monday to publish his first book of poetry.

Graywolf Press, the independent Minnesota publisher, said that it had acquired a new poetry collection by Mr. Franco called “Directing Herbert White,” which it plans to release in April 2014.

The collection takes its title from a poem Mr. Franco composed about his work on a short film that he, in turn, adapted from the poem “Herbert White,” by Frank Bidart.

Mr. Franco said in a twitter interview on Monday that this poem was “about my relationship to that poem, Frank’s relationship to the poem as I have learned about it from knowing Frank and the adaptation process,” and “how Frank puts so much of himself into the figure of this psycho necrophiliac.” The other works in the collection, he said, were “a way to blend film and poetry and performance and persona — all the things that I think are related to that poem and that process I went through of adapting that poem.”

Mr. Franco, who has portrayed poets in films like “Howl” (which cast him as Allen Ginsberg) and “The Broken Tower” (in which he played Hart Crane, and which he also wrote and directed), is not simply an admirer of well-crafted verse: he also holds a master of fine arts in creative writing from Brooklyn College in New York and an M.F.A. in poetry from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. His previously published writings include a short story collection, “Palo Alto.”

Jeffrey Shotts, the poetry editor of Graywolf Press, described Mr. Franco’s new poetry collection in a statement as “a frank and illuminating set of scenes from inside filmmaking and fame.” He said that these poems “are, in part, a series of portraits of American successes and failures from within Hollywood, as a young actor comes of age.” He added, “But they are also smart and highly aware notes of caution of what can happen when the filmed self becomes fixed and duplicated, while the ongoing self must continue living and watching.”

 

100Feed Special Report: The New Haiku

Haiku (originally Hokku) is a form of Japanese poetry consisting of 17 moras in three phrases of five, seven and five moras respectively. Moras differ from syllables in a variety of ways. One mora in Japanese can be equal to one short syllable, one elongated vowel, dipthong, doubled consonant, or one “n” at the end of a syllable. The word “haibun” contains two syllables (hai-bun) but four moras (ha-i-bu-n). “Tokyo” contains three syllables (To-ky-o) but four moras in Japanese (To-u-kyo-u).

American forms of haiku are a more relaxed form of the poetry. Take, for example, my favorite haiku written by Jack Kerouac: snap your finger / stop the world / rain falls harder. As you can see, the first line contains only four syllables, the second contains three and the third line contains four. According to the Haiku Society of America, the norm for American haiku is to use seventeen syllables. The past president of the HSA, Alexis Rotella, could not resist one of these shorter haikus in the Summer 2009 print of “Prune Juice – Journal of Senryu and Kyoka”:

She could use
a good editor –
chatterbox

As you can see, American haiku is not strictly limited to seventeen syllable poems about nature. Haiku can be about anything, everything or nothing. It can be short (less than seventeen syllables) or traditional. You may use capitalization, but it is not required except when referring to a proper noun. It may or may not rhyme. The only requirements for an American haiku are three lines and a topic.

Haiku is easy to write, but difficult to write well. The secret to writing beautiful haiku is to make your phrases memorable. It must create an image so unique that it burns an image into the mind of the reader. If you think about the structure of a haiku poem, you know the first and second lines tend to draw a rather ordinary picture. In Jack Kerouac’s haiku, you see in the first two lines an image of someone snapping their fingers and stopping time. Though it creates a wonderful idea in the reader’s mind, “if only I could stop time that easily…”, it is not enough. It is dull. It is the third line that makes the poem unique and memorable; “rain falls harder” indicates that the world has stopped for just a moment, just long enough for the raindrops to pause in midair and for the reader to “witness” these events. Then it is over. Time returns to normal and the rain falls to the ground. However, there was that one moment of magic – that moment when the earth stood still – that made the poem beautiful.

Another method of creating memorable haiku is the “unfinished” poem. Though the haiku consists of three lines and completes an idea, there are still a few questions left unanswered. In Denis M. Garrison’s book of haiku entitled “Hidden River”, there is one such poem on page 46:

The old tomcat hunting
at meadow’s edge
he waits …

The reader asks, “he waits… and then what happens?” This is what makes the haiku memorable. The first line presents us with a tomcat, hunting. For what, we don’t know. The second line indicates that the tomcat is hunting for something in a meadow; this immediately creates an image of the cat being hidden by green grass. This cat is an unstoppable predator… he is unseen and he is about to pounce. What is stopping him from pouncing? He is waiting for the right moment: the moment when he can jump at his prey and sink his teeth into the fresh kill. What we don’t know is what happens when he attacks. Does he catch his prey? Does the victim escape? We will never know, and this sort of mystery expands the poem. It makes us think beyond the writing

Editor’s Note: Readers are urged to send their original Haiku to 100Feed via comments on this post. Once we collect 100 original haikus, we will publish them in one of our 100Feed lists of haiku. The poem can be about anything and you may write them in either Japanese form or in the American form. Be sure to include your first and last name in the comment.