Thirty years ago, a young up-and-coming actor, Craig Wasson, starred in Ghost Story, a beautifully-shot adaptation of the Peter Straub horror novel. The film was very well received critically, not least because of the casting of several elderly classic actors, including Fred Astaire. I recall it being very new England; and a scene on a wintry country road. It was like Frost meets King. I think this film has become forgotten; it is not available on DVD in Britain, at the very least. Googling for Wasson, I was disappointed to learn that, after 1984's Body Double (which has a Frankie Goes to Hollywood cameo) he mostly slipped into soaps, and one-off appearances on TV. Wasson was born in 1954, so he'd be around 57 now. I'd like to see some director bring him back and give him a good role again.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
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