Tag: poems

Writer’s Desk: Things to Write in the New Year

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

Nobody likes New Year’s resolutions, least of all writers. Setting out a list of things you need to do in the next twelve months can just feel like a list of things you will forget to do. We should never forget the unique joy that comes with not doing, per the great Douglas Adams:

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Nevertheless, January is not a bad time for new thinking. The holidays are past. Work is back. The nights are long. There are too many new streaming shows to commit to. Maybe you’re dissatisfied with what you wrote last year. It’s worth thinking about trying something different.

To wit:

  • Poem. It can be (and, let’s be honest, almost certainly will be) a bad poem. But if you are not used to it, the form and the choices it forces you to make are excellent training. This can be like stretching for writers.
  • Autobiographical essay. Write five pages about something that happened in your childhood that you never told anybody about. It doesn’t need to be anything earth-shattering or more consequential than a memory of a favorite toy. Write it so that some aspect of your life can make sense to another person.
  • Joke. Standup comics riff on stage but they also painstakingly craft jokes beforehand. Write three jokes. Tell them to people. See what lands and what doesn’t. Revise.

Try none or all of these. The point is to do something that is unfamiliar. I spent the last many months in multiple nonfiction book projects. Once done with those, I will be trying to give fiction another shot. Most likely, it will never see the light of day. But then most of what we make never does.

The trying is the point. Keep trying.

Writer’s Corner: James Franco is a Poet Now, Too

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

At some point, you would think that the whirling creative polymath that is James Franco would settle down. Onetime heartthrob actor turned creator of curious art installment films (Interior. Leather Bar), star of trashy-smart comedies (This Is the End), director of small-scale literary adaptations (As I Lay Dying), author of novels and short stories, and now: poetry.

francobook1Instead of going with a big press for his collection, Directing Herbert White, Franco smartly went with one of the more respected small poetry outfits out there: the expert Minnesota-based indie Graywolf Press. You can read an excerpt from the collection here.

How is the poetry itself? Not that memorable, but not noticeably worse than much of what’s out there and not necessarily contingent on Franco’s name.

As David Orr puts it in last week’s Times‘ Sunday Book Review, it’s:

“Directing Herbert White” is the sort of collection written by reasonably talented M.F.A. students in hundreds of M.F.A. programs stretching from sea to shining sea. Which is perhaps not surprising, since Franco actually has an M.F.A. in poetry…

…uniformly written in the kind of flat, prosy free verse that has dominated American poetry for ages (typical line: “New Orleans Square is my favorite part of Disneyland”), with stanzas that aren’t so much stanzas as elongated paragraphs.

One could argue that it’s just that flat and unadorned poetic style which all too often reads as lazy and slashed-up prose than actual lyricism which has helped reduce poetry to its currently weakened state.

But Orr’s ultimate take on the book is probably the right one. In short, there’s a lot of bad poetry out there. Better that somebody with the name recognition of Franco is at least taking up the flag and giving it an honest go:

Poetry is the weak sister of its sibling arts, alternately ignored and swaddled like a 19th-century invalid, and that will change only by means of a long, tedious and possibly futile effort at persuasion. Perhaps it’s a blessing to have James Franco on one’s side in that struggle.