Directing Herbert White
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Directing Herbert White is the debut poetry collection by the actor, director, and writer James Franco
I'm a nocturnal creature,
And I'm here to cheat time.
You can see time and exhaustion
Taking pay from my face—
In fifty years
My sleep will be death,
I'll go like the rest,
But I'll have played
All the games and all the roles.
—from "Nocturnal"
"There's never been a book quite like this. Hollywood—fame, celebrity, the promise of becoming an artist—is the beast at its center. Franco knows it like Melville knows whaling. Hollywood in this book devours its young. Obsessed with myths about its own past, it can be survived only by finding a vantage point that is not Hollywood. Bold yet subtle, fearless yet disarming, Franco has made a book you will never forget." —Frank Bidart
"A star-studded cast moves like ghosts across the screen of James Franco's poetic consciousness, imbuing the writing with scenes of icons who are also humans replete with sorrow and presence in our own psyches. James Dean, Monica Vitti, Catherine Deneuve, Sal Mineo, Heath Ledger, pass and fade. The author has a wonderful, self-reflexive insouciance about his own fame and roles inhabited, from Hart Crane to Allen Ginsberg to Harvey Milk's lover. Franco is a gifted contemporary Renaissance kind of guy, surveying the waterfront of illusion, suffering, and impermanance. We leave the movie theater a little wiser." —Anne Waldman
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his surprisingly vivid first collection of poems, film and TV star Franco writes what he knows: sonnets, sequences, and terse persona poems that explore the traps and trips of adolescence and the seductive, sometimes fatal paradoxes of Hollywood. Aggressively ragged in line and stanza shape, productively coy in their play with who speaks and for whom, Franco's pages address "the life I made for myself" along with the lives of less fortunate media darlings: Heath Ledger, Sean Penn, Sal Mineo, Lindsay Lohan. The title refers to the film Franco made from Frank Bidart's poem about a necrophiliac killer; there and elsewhere, Franco portrays himself as actor, director, writer, teenager, adult, and self-haunting ghost, never away from an imagined lens. Poems titled after Smiths songs reimagine doomed friends from eventful teen years "I found I had the love life of the octopus,/ Groping and grappling." and establish his feel for life offscreen. As with his fiction, some readers will say that the book leans too hard on his prior fame: and yet fame, and its effects, are Franco's primary subjects. The best of these poems are works no one else could have written, bright reflections on the author's ambitiously dizzying time in the spotlight or is it a hall of mirrors?
Customer Reviews
Whether or Not
Whether you know of James Franco's work or not he truly has a gift for poetry. I'd recommend this book for any fan of poetry. If you want a glimpse into the heart and mind of James Franco this is definitely a great place to start. He is an extremely sensitive and dynamic artist. It shows in his writing as he muses over events we all share. Some are more personal than others but overall relate-able, and very moving. I was very sad that I finished it so soon. Thank you very much to Mr Franco himself for allowing us a glimpse into your incredibly exciting life. I sincerely hope you find what you're searching for. ~ Kyl3