Literary Hub on Poetry as a Medium for Celebrities' Cause Célèbre

From Lindsay Lohan to James Franco, celebrities have a habit of dalliances with poetry. Most of the time, Literary Hub writer Philippa Snow writes, their experiments with the genre don't yield great results, despite their verse's charms. "Like most teens, they sometimes make really bad, terribly serious art. Sometimes this bad art is bad poetry: as when, earlier this year, the actress Lindsay Lohan shared some verse she’d written on Instagram. 'Like teenagers, famous people are indulged and relatively gorgeous.' Nobody seemed to have made this particular big decision for her." Let's take a close look at a few more examples:

The poem is partly about ISIS, but mostly about Lindsay Lohan's unrest and unease, and her feeling that her time would be better spent solving the problem. Like every famous person’s work that I’ve reproduced here, it appears [sic]:

Sometimes I hear the voice of the one I loved the most
but in this world we live in of terror
who I am to be the girl who is scared and hurt
when most things that happen I cannot explain
I try to understand
when I’m sitting in bed at 3am
so I can’t sleep, I roll over
I can’t think and my body becomes cold
I immediately feel older . . .
then I realise, at least I am in a bed
I am still alive
so what can really be said?
just go on to bed and close the blinds
still and so on, I cannot help but want to fix all of these idle isis minds
because,
there has to be something I can figure out
rather than living in a world of fear and doubt
they now shoot, we used to shout
if only I can keep trying to fix it all
I would keep the world loving and small
I would share my smiles
and give too many kisses

"Celebrities—they're just like us!" is sometimes true. They're also sometimes just like we once were. Imagine thinking there was something you yourself could "figure out" through the medium of verse to end terror: then think about being 15. The two are not dissimilar exercises. "When you're 17 you know everything," Ray Bradbury writes in Dandelion Wine. "When you're 27, if you still know everything, you're still 17." I keep up with pretty much everything that Lindsay Lohan does—if there were to be such a thing as a "Lindsayologist," I would feel just in accepting the title—and so I'm aware that she's long been planning to write a book. I was not aware that it might be a book of poetry. It's difficult to be too critical, as there's something so unspoiled about wanting to keep the world "loving and small," and thinking that extremists are only extremists because their minds are idle.

Read more. It's not all bad though, is it?