And you never think, but you should,
He was too old and ugly for her in the first place.
Film Sonnet 4
Wonderful whore, Deneuve, to flow
From the Polanski madness to Umbrellas to the housewife
With a penchant for sex. And in that one, I could watch
The john with the swordcane five million times.
His black hair and iron teeth. Good casting, Buñuel:
Pierre Clémenti, later he worked with Bertolucci
On the adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Double.
He’s also in a little flashback in The Conformist.
In Belle de Jour, there is a shot of him and Deneuve
That starts on their faces as they make out on the bed,
Then the camera pans over their horizontal legs, to their feet,
At which point Pierre pushes the toe of one wicked black boot against the heel
Of the other, and the boot drops to the floor to reveal
A red sock with a hole at the end, his big toe snailing out.
Film Sonnet 5
She begins brokenhearted. She is barred
From her apartment. She has nothing
To eat and walks around Paris one night
With a man she knew before her troubles.
He takes her to a diner and she sleeps with him
For money. First it was the one man and then
Many men. That’s called prostitution.
It was easier to fall into everything
Once she had done it the one time.
Sontag called this film “near perfect.”
Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
Is stuffed in the middle, whole sections,
A film within a film, to align great suffering
With the suffering of the humble.
Film Sonnet 6
You, Monica Vitti, with your lips, like fruit, how could
That guy in L’avventura be blamed for forgetting
The other pouty bitch? If I got a new life I’d pray for
A girl like you. The island where you lose your friend,
Deserted and mysterious. And then after looking
All over Italy for her, you fall for him. And what is
It that compels him, in the aftermath of that party?
In the destroyed room, strewn with plates, silverware,
Food and candlesticks, he with her, on the dislodged
Couch? And what is it that compels you to let it pass,
Just like you let pass the death of a friend?
A mystery. Like in your other Antonioni film, L’eclisse,
Which ends with a series of unchanging images:
The building, the sky, a fence, a street.
VII.
Nocturnal
I fight sleep like it’s a sickness.
I work up my resistance.
I push it back as far as possible
Every night, like a runner,
Working down his time.
I run through books
And hike through films
And write like a sprinter.
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.
Brad Renfro
on the fourth anniversary of his death
There is one of two things that happen
When a kid enters the biz.
Either the parents guide that kid
And he becomes a product,
Or he gets no guidance
And he becomes a menace.
Brad Renfro broke out when he was a
As a newcomer to LA, I remember
Hearing about the wild youngster
High at adult parties,
Making jokes like an adult.
When I worked with him
In Deuces Wild, he, the wise age of seventeen,
Had the body of a beat-up,
Balding, beer-bellied adult.
He had played the young version of Brad Pitt
In Sleepers, had played opposite Ian McKellen
In Apt Pupil, had been a talented little mother,
And then it turned
And he wore out like an engine without oil.
He tried to steal a boat, he got caught in a sweep
In downtown LA that the addicts down there
Talked about for a year.
And when he died, it was a week before Heath,
And because Brad wasn’t in Brokeback,
And because Brad didn’t play the Joker,
The joke was on him; he wasn’t even mentioned
At the Oscars, while Heath won the award.
But I remember you, Brad. Not for your warmth,
Or professionalism, or skill,
But because you were someone that was picked up,
Used, fed with drugs, forgotten, and killed.
Directing Herbert White
When Frank wrote “Herbert White” he was a student at Harvard.
•
Frank grew up in Bakersfield, California.
•
Frank had a tough childhood. He wanted to be a filmmaker. He loved film. His mother would drive him to LA to see films.
•
There were only technical film schools in the 1950s, nothing like USC or NYU now, so Frank went to Riverside and studied English, and then went on to Harvard and studied with Robert Lowell.
•
His first book, Golden State, was published by Richard Howard. None of the poems had been published in magazines.
•
Golden State, what a fucking title. Frank is the loving son of Lowell and the rebel son of Ginsberg. He is the recondite and the hip.
•
Herbert came out of a cheap, dime-store, medical case study called 21 Abnormal Sex Cases, cases that included “The Homosexual” and “The Transvestite.” Herbert was “The Necrophiliac.” In that book he did horrible things, like fuck dogs’ stomachs while they were still alive. In Frank’s poem Herbert fucks a goat.
•
James got to know Frank when he asked Frank if he could make a movie out of his poem. Frank told James he loved him in Pineapple Express.
•
They spent eight hours together the first time they met. They just talked and talked at the restaurant, Frank’s regular place in Cambridge, Mass., where he eats every Friday with his buddy Louise Glück. James and Frank stayed after everyone left, oblivious that the restaurant had left a waiter behind to lock the door after them.
•
James knew after hearing the poem read in a class at Warren Wilson that it was something he wanted to adapt into film. These impulses are visceral. It wasn’t just because it was about a killer, it was because the killer had been fused with something else. Frank was playing with both sides of the coin again. There are moments in the poem when the killer takes down his mask, and the poet shows through.
•
It wasn’t just that Frank had decided to put Herbert’s story into lines of verse; Frank had given elements of his own Bakersfield childhood to Herbert. The father, the place, and the desire to make sense of the world were all Frank’s.
•
James learned all of this later.
•
Frank also gave Herbert his own young life’s isol
ation and loneliness. This is a guess, but Frank as a young gay man in 1950s Bakersfield must have felt like he had a secret, a secret so dark that he could tell no one. A secret so dark he attempted to become a priest to avoid himself.
•
At the end of the poem it sounds like Herbert is in hell or in jail. He says,
—Hell came when I saw
MYSELF . . .
and couldn’t stand
what I see . . .
This is a reference to Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” “I myself am hell,” which references Milton’s Satan. There is no way Herbert, without Frank’s help, would ever reference Milton.
•
There is a part in the poem,
Still, I liked to drive past the woods where she lay,
tell the old lady and the kids I had to take a piss,
hop out and do it to her . . .
The whole buggy of them waiting for me
made me feel good;
He has a family! And they don’t know he’s a killer! So, he has a deep secret. This was the source of tension that James would use in the film. Herbert has a secret—he’s a murderer of women and a fucker of corpses—which he can tell no one.
•
A beautiful thing happened. In the place in Virginia where James was planning to shoot the film, they started tearing down the trees. Huge machines cutting them down and shipping them away. Machines like you’ve never seen, one with a tractor body and a crane arm at the end of which is a huge claw that clutches whole trees and cuts them with a circular saw in one, two, three seconds, then tosses the trunk like a doll.
•
They let the actor playing Herbert, Michael Shannon, get in this machine and drive it for the film.
•
The machine stood in for Herbert’s inner life. He cut people down.
•
The man who actually operated the machine for a living was named Gator. He taught Michael Shannon to drive the terrible thing. It was as easy as playing a video game.
•
Once they had the machine as a metaphor they had everything they needed. The machine was the key to the story of Herbert White as told on film.
•
Frank never reads the poem to audiences. The one time he did, back in the 1960s, he warned the audience that it was not a confessional poem, because confessional poetry was all the rage in those days. The only way into the hall was a wooden staircase, and after Frank started the reading an elderly woman made her way up the stairs, clop, clop, clop. She came in and listened. She didn’t like what she heard. She got up and went back down, right though the reading, clop, clop, clop.
•
The poem is told in the first person, but it isn’t Frank speaking. He’s wearing a mask. Or two.
•
Frank isn’t married. He lives alone among stacks of books and DVDs and CDs. The stacks are so large and numerous they have become his walls.
•
Sometimes, I would like to live in a tight space and be a spy on the world.
Ledger
I’ve tried to write about you.
I didn’t know you.
There was the one time I met you in Teddy’s,
The club connected to the Roosevelt Hotel,
The night Prince was playing,
Around the time of all the award shows
When you were nominated for everything
For Brokeback Mountain.
And you were with your woman, Michelle;
Two blonds, quiet and stern, mystical.
I wrote a poem about you before,
Back when you died,
But it was coded and unclear
Because I didn’t dare write about you openly
Because your death had made you Holy
In Hollywood. You got it all
When you died, you got all
The gold statues because
You were the Joker, with your tongue
Swirling and your death.
There had been a time
When we were up for the same roles,
10 Things I Hate about You
(Based on The Taming of the Shrew),
And The Patriot—
Funny, you were Australian and so was Mel—
You were the knight in A Knight’s Tale
Although I’m sure you wished you weren’t.
And then something happened,
You played gay and you took off;
You were an artist
For a moment.
Was it too much?
Was it the drugs
That helped you?
The drugs that killed you?
Was it the acting?
Was it all of us,
Outside the screen,
Just watching?
When I Hit Thirty-Four
I looked around for love
And I knew by then
That love wasn’t worship,
That love was ease.
Love was the smooth river
Of forgiveness that takes all
Obstacles, pollution and debris
(Love is of man, he sets the rules),
Pushes them downstream
And leaves them in the ocean.
I like the beer bottles that collect
Along the shore, the trash
From diaper boxes and Clorox.
These are rainbow-colored punctuations
Stuck into nature, man-made things
Corroded by my love.
Sometimes things are washed
Clean as when a hurricane
Moves through, sucking up houses
As if they were cardboard.
Love is not of man;
Nature sets the rules.
I’ve lived a life;
I’ve learned a few things
And this is a new lesson.
It says, surrender.
Telephone
In my parents’ old bedroom
With the blue and white wallpaper
Of paisleys and flowers
There was a cream rotary phone.
I’d lie on the bed
That I used to lie on with my dad
As he’d pretend to steal my nose
—It was really just his thumb
Between his fingers—
I’d play with the phone,
Working the circle
Over the numbers
And forcing it back,
Slower than going forward.
My father’s middle name
Was Eugene, but when I was young
I’d say “blue jeans.” The phone
Was a toy until I had people to call.
One day area codes appeared.
So many numbers to remember.
Now you don’t have to remember any.
Love
Love is a woman
Who does many things.
I don’t laugh at her
Anymore, she’s no fool.
You’re the fool
If you think art comes from craft.
Art comes from framing.
Art comes from human imperfection.
Arrogantly, I once wondered
If I would be like Flaubert
Living with a person
Who would never understand my work.
Now I realize that I am understood
Only too well;
I’m a raging Kowalski whose
Temper can be measured by
How little I can give.
How abusive my reticence.
I wish I
could turn
And be smacked
With an angel’s wallop.
My wandering eye
Is glutted on the world,
But like William Friedkin
Said, after filming fantastic
Landscapes in his failed film
Sorcerer, “Instead of nature,
I should have focused
On the landscape of the human face.”
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the editors of the following publications where many of these poems, sometimes in earlier versions, first appeared:
The American Poetry Review: “Los Angeles Proverb” and “Film Sonnet 3”
DIAGRAM: “Directing Herbert White”
The Huffington Post: “31”
The Paris-American: “Hart Crane’s Tomb” and “Film Sonnet 6”
Post Road: “Film Sonnet 4” and “Film Sonnet 5”
“Marlon Brando,” “Seventh Grade,” “Fifth Grade,” “Fake,” “Nocturnal,” “When I Hit Thirty-Four,” “Telephone,” and “Love” appeared in the chapbook Strongest of the Litter, published by Hollyridge Press, 2012.
The ten poems in “The Best of the Smiths” appeared in 113 Crickets, published by Dymaxicon, summer 2012.
“My Place” and “Second Grade” appeared in A California Childhood, published by Insight Editions, 2013.
“River” appeared in Actors Anonymous, published by Little A/New Harvest, 2013.
Thank you, Jeff Shotts and everyone at Graywolf, for making this the best book it could be. I have found a home.
Thank you, Richard Abate, for your guidance and belief.
I have been blessed with the best poetry teachers alive: Alan Shapiro, Alan Williamson, Ellen Bryant Voigt, James Longenbach, Rick Barot, Heather McHugh, Tony Hoagland, and Frank Bidart. The Warren Wilson writing program is a little bit of writers’ paradise on earth. Thank you to everyone who is a part of it and the three women who made it run while I studied there: Deb Allbery, Amy Grimm, and Alissa Whelan.
Thank you to my family, my friends, fellow writers, fellow filmmakers, Michael Shannon, and everyone else who people these poems. You are in me, and I consist of you.
Author photograph: Anna Kooris
JAMES FRANCO is an actor, director, writer, and visual artist. He is the author of two works of fiction, Palo Alto and Actors Anonymous, and a collage of memoir, snapshots, poems, and artwork, A California Childhood. His poetry has appeared in a chapbook, Strongest of the Litter. Directing Herbert White is Franco’s first full-length book of poetry. His writing has also been published in Esquire, the Huffington Post, McSweeney’s, n+1, Vanity Fair, and the Wall Street Journal. He has received MFAs in fiction from Brooklyn College and Columbia, an MFA in film from New York University, an MFA in art from Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.