For a while, one of my prized possessions was a slim volume of handwritten poems given to me by my senior-year crush. He gave them to me on the last day of our spring semester because I’d been “really supportive” and spent hours on the phone with him workshopping his poems. I remember especially liking one that had repeated the refrain “Give me back / my ice cream cone,” and another one that referenced “Jeff Buckley” and “erections.”
The poet was a lax-bro with a hot bod and green eyes and swoopy hair. And underneath that hot bod and monosyllabic jock exterior, I was delighted to discover that he had the soul of a poet, and a true talent for rhyme and verse — a soul and talent only I could tease out through our after-school phone chats. Well into our freshman year of college, he would e-mail me poems that he never showed anyone else, and I would tell him he reminded me of T.S. Eliot, his favorite. (Weird, also my favorite.) I loved poems, and him. Then I met a ginger in the in the film department, then poems were elitist and boring.
Then today, James Franco wrote a poem for The Guardian. It’s called “I Was Born Into A World,” and it’s all about climate change. You can read the whole thing below, though I’d recommend listening to the recording of Franco reading it. (Yes, I’m pretty sure he’s right. The correct pronunciation of Dodo is Do-dow.)
A few of my favorite lines:
We send out loud messages
To ourselves,
That our world is dying:
1984, Blade Runner,
Armageddon, The Road.
I’ve yet to read a book,
Or watch a film about a future
I’d like to live in.
Fortunately for me,
I’ll die before the earth,
But I’d like a place for my
Computer chip self
To click and beep
In bright, clean happiness.
God, guys, James Franco’s poem is really good, no? Suddenly, I’m super interested in poetry again.
