If you were alive in 1985 and happened to buy Eddie Murphy’s album “How Could It Be” (featuring the hit single “Party All the Time”), then you may have asked yourself — in addition to wondering what shape of Band-Aid is best suited to the human ear — why it is that artists who are vastly successful in one genre feel the need to dabble in another. Because they do, a lot. Sometimes it’s just the case that they happen to be very good at more than one thing (by all accounts, Steve Martin is a genuinely excellent banjo player). But often there seems to be something else going on.

Nor is this a recent phenomenon. In his 1855 poem “One Word More,” Robert Browning suggested that creative sensibilities are drawn to “art alien to the artist’s” because branching out lets a person “be the man and leave the artist, / Gain the man’s joy, miss the artist’s sorrow.” He meant that the more we master the techniques of our native art, the more our art becomes an expression of those techniques rather than a portal on our individuality. The more fluent we become, the more we become armored in that fluency. The issue is further complicated because arts differ in more than their formal elements; they also occupy different areas of the culture. So what happens when the genre-switch is not merely between forms, but between practices that stand in relation to each other as, say, professional football stands in relation to professional badminton?

DIRECTING HERBERT WHITE: Poems (Graywolf, paper, $15) is a new book by James Franco, the Oscar-nominated actor, former Oscar host and all-around celebrity. That he would put out a book of poems with a respected press isn’t groundbreaking — Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins published a collection called “Blinking With Fists” with Faber & Faber in 2004, an act for which we will all surely pay when great Cthulhu rises. But what’s different about Franco’s book is that it doesn’t obviously represent a cash grab by the publisher or an ego trip by the artist. The blurbs accompanying this collection are from actual poets — Tony Hoagland, Frank Bidart — as opposed to the expected gaggle of hanger-arounders. And Graywolf, while one of the best publishers of American poetry, is probably not in a position to pay Franco an enormous advance or put him in front of the Oprah audience. This book is intended for real poetry readers, all five of them, as well as Franco’s Twitter followers, all 2.2 million.

But is it, you may be wondering, good? No. But neither is it entirely bad. “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. I’m obliged here to note that this actor is well acquainted with the educational system, having apparently attended graduate programs at Yale, Columbia, New York University, Brooklyn College, Warren Wilson College, the Rhode Island School of Design, Le Cordon Bleu, Quantico, Hogwarts (Ravenclaw), the Vaganova School of Russian Ballet and the Jedi Academy.