In Which We Critically Assess James Franco’s Birthday Poem

James Franco wrote a poem about directing a film about a guy who fucks goats.

Also, about his birthday. The reason for the poem’s publication on The Huffington Post blog is that on his 35th birthday (five days ago), Franco was on set playing a sociopathic murderer — which paralleled the experience of his 31st birthday (four years ago) when he was on set filming a sociopathic murderer.

And about which he wrote the poem, ‘31’, the conceit of which is possibly more opaque — so I’ve done a stanza by stanza breakdown for you, below.

Before we get there, we should note that this isn’t the first time Franco has hung his poetry out to dry. He previously published a chapbook, Strongest of the Litter, and wrote a poem for Obama’s inauguration, both of which have garnered no small amount of ridicule.

This also isn’t the first time Junkee has wrestled with the question that hangs around Jimmy’s neck like a half-dead, half-alive albatross: What even is a James Franco? Is he a narcissist addicted to his own celebrity or a tireless postmodernist? You be the judge.

’31’ – A Poem By James Franco

It was birthday thirty-one

I was in Suffolk, Virginia, directing

A short film called Herbert White.

Right from the get-go, the poem chides with its purported context. He wrote the poem on his birthday, supposedly, and yet he’s using the past tense: it was birthday thirty-one. Perhaps Franco is trying to signal the essential pastness of everything in life, particularly birthdays; all the occasions we act out in our minds prior to our experience of them.

 

We stayed at the Hilton Gardens,

The only hotel in town,

The rest are motels, rented monthly.

And for all we know, the birthday has already happened. Either Franco is writing the poem after his birthday (which he said he wasn’t), or he’s reflecting on the birthday as an event – on the birthdayness of the birthday, as Heidegger would contend – from within the birthday, projecting into a future self to better consider the experience.

Or he was just careless in saying he wrote it on his birthday when what he meant was about his birthday.

 

There are no restaurants, but plenty of strip malls,

Prefabricated houses and little swamps;

People sit in their cars in gas-station lots

At any rate, this birthday is different. There’s no coke, no spring breakers, no temazepam snorted off the skin behind Harmony Korine’s knee. Franco has work to do and a passion to follow. Sure, he’s staying at the Hilton, but it’s the only hotel in town, give the guy a break. This is a birthday that bucks the trend, that exceeds itself as an event, that will define Franco not just now but for many birthdays to come. Specifically his thirty-fifth.

Note also in this stanza the ambiguity over whether the swamps are as prefabricated as the houses. Does all existence take place within artifice?

 

And eat and smoke.

This is eating out in Suffolk.

The actor that fucks a goat in my film

This town and its sleepiness jars with Franco as a person and as an idea. It’s not where we expect him to be, and it’s not where he expects us to expect him to be. And yet it is exactly where we think he imagines we want him to be, dedicated to his art.

That’s why this birthday is the one being memorialised. Partly because it does and doesn’t conflict with our idea of a Franconian birthday, and partly, I believe, because he’s chosen to remember it, making the birthday significant by writing the poem about the experience as it’s happening.

He steps outside the moment to appreciate the moment.

 

Was home-schooled because his parents didn’t

Want him to be subjected to drugs, guns and violence.

“And blacks,” I think.

Did he think that aloud – is that why it’s in quotes? This is the first time a voice breaks through his reminiscence, even though it’s his own voice, or, more accurately, one of his many voices.

It’s also the poem’s only slip into present tense. Is Franco thinking it in the moment as he steps out of the moment to write the poem about it?

Or, is he stepping back into the moment to cut through the artifice of thinking and writing and get down to what is really on his mind?

To paraphrase Dana Goodyear on Franco’s installation art: no one is not confused.

 

Indian River, the school is called.

Tyrone is his name, a handsome, dumb-faced kid.

There were baby goats; they ran around their pen on stiff, stumpy legs.

To belatedly address the issue of fucking goats, I should point out that the film Franco is making during the writing of this poem, Herbert White, is based on a Frank Bidart poem of the same name. That poem is a disturbing and affecting and an amazing achievement in the poetic form, bearing no stylistic or qualitative resemblance to this poem. In this way, ‘31’ both is and isn’t a homage to Bidart’s original, which, for what it’s worth, contains goat fucking.

 

I’ve had good and bad birthdays.

And boy do they make me think

About when I was younger,

In a long-proven poetic manoeuvre, Franco now uses this birthday as a prism through which to consider previous birthdays, as well as past selves. There’s an echo of the future here too, an almost-knowingness as Franco’s thirty-one-year-old self looks not only backward but forward to his thirty-fifth birthday, to when this birthday will no longer be singular but become emblematic of the passing of the years.

 

When I had no friends and my mom drove me to school

Because I lost my license drunk-driving, and we wouldn’t talk,

We would listen to Blonde on Blonde

Identity is fluid, and for no one more than Franco. When he’s not writing poetry, he’s acting, finishing a post-doc, working with performance artist Marina Abramović. Critics have targeted this proliferation of activity, pointing to what they see as a lack of consistency in these projects, specifically regarding quality. To them, the proof is in the pudding. He’s hoist not only by his own petard, but also by his Motown-inspired band, Daddy.

 

Every morning, and life was like moving through something

Thick and gray that had no purpose.

And now I see that everything has had as much purpose

But to fans, this effusiveness is the job of the artist. Everyone makes mistakes, James just makes his publicly. Except they’re not mistakes: they’re fragments of the slowly-being-realised-but-forever-unrealisable art project that is James Franco. Each project is not to be regarded individually, but intertextually, as part of the whole.

 

As I give it, or at least it can all make its way

Into my poem and become something else,

And in that way all that shit, and all those bad birthdays,

At the end of Bidart’s poem, the narrator has an existential crisis. Having lived with his violent deviations by considering them the work of someone else, he finds at this moment that he no longer can:

I tried, and tried, but there was just me there,
and her, and the sharp trees
saying, “That’s you standing there.
You’re …
just you.’

Franco is Franco, not anyone else, and he knows this.

 

And the good ones are markers in an anniversary line –

And they carry less and less of their original pain,

And become emptier, just markers really, building blocks,

But we need to remember that the situation – directing the film, being in Suffolk on his birthday, being James Franco – is of his own making. He’s the director. He chose this project, chose this path. Or did he? I don’t mean do any of us really choose anything ever, but has James Franco, specifically, chosen anything? With all his voices and projects, he refuses to adhere to the idea of the actor or director or musician or celebrity that we know so well. In doing so, he’s chosen a unique path. It’s lonely, perhaps, but every experience is significant because it’s his. And because he turns every experience into an art project, letting things make their way into poems, it’s significant for us too.

 

To be turned into constructions and fucked with.

You’re telling me. On his thirty-fifth birthday Franco publishes a poem about his thirty-first birthday wherein he steps outside the moment to reflect on the moment as it’s happening, thinking about what it means to be Franco, how being Franco has led both unpredictably and foreseeably to being Franco, while he projects into a future self that at once acknowledges the singularity of the experience as well as its inevitable repeatability (as in now, four years later). It’s visionary, it’s metonymic, it’s candid and honest.

We are nothing if not fucked with.

In 2014, James Franco’s debut poetry collection, Directing Herbert White, will be published by Graywolf Press.

 

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Aden Rolfe is a writer and editor whose practice includes poetry, performance writing and criticism. He works as a copywriter in the arts, publishing and corporate sectors. His website is here.