Pasolini's Italian poems were made as civil poems, in bright contrast to the then still dominant mode of poetic discourse, hermeticism—whose style was, I think, a function of its poets living under the growth and success of fascism. Pasolini's Italian poems, from 1954 to his death, are discourse appropriate to a post-fascist society, and fully use a climate of freer speech. Pasolini's long civil poems link him to Whitman and Pound and Ginsberg, but he is a real original—and just as the films of this film-poet have had roughest going in America, of all the non-Communist world, the poems will also upset some ideas about what a poem can't be—but I think the soil is already prepared by the three aforementioned American poets, and that Pasolini's poetry and career will have a deep effect on American poetry, and thus on American life.

American poetry 1980 is at a point of particular opportunity. For at least ten years a network of poetry queries and magazines has been in the process of organizing itself. The outlets are there for publishing good and great work, as well as the usual vast amount of mediocre writings. But hermeticisms of all kinds abound, and an unworkable hermetic esthetic has hold of most of the organs that publish poetry. The poet is still at the outskirts of the society, however. And Pasolini's example of gaining and maintaining a central place as poet in the society will I hope be noted by all poets. I think his poetry will in fact have an effect on ours similar to its impact on Italian poetry, because American poetry takes its cues largely from master poets who are hermetics (Whitman, Pound, and Ginsberg excepted) rather than civil poets. Though Pound supported fascism and Pasolini his own form of "never-orthodox" Marxism, it was special versions of each, and both poets share many qualities—most importantly, they included politics in their poetry, and they were tireless in promoting the wellbeing of culture….

More than anything else, what sets … most of Pasolini's work apart from ways of thinking that collide with Power—the power of the superpowers, for example—is the element of homosexuality…. Pasolini made an effort to be honest about his homosexuality, if for no other reason than to avoid the blackmail inevitable to those who have something to hide. The boys and young men he was attracted to had mythic status for him; as he writes in a late poem, "A boy in his first loves is none other than the fecundity of the world." Two subproletarian boys spark the long poem "The Religion of My Time" from 1959 which is one of the great visions of Italy and the world at that time. His relations with peasant and subproletarian males were completely in line with his politics. His behavior as lover of them and memorializer of them in film and poem causes a whole group hitherto almost unseen in art to be brought forward…. [The] long poem, "A Desperate Vitality," written in 1963, … illustrates the method well: the poet has been interviewed by a newspaper reporter. The poem is filled with cinematic touches, with references to Godard's film Contempt (based on a story by Alberto Moravia then being filmed in Rome; one of the first lines is: "As in a film by Godard"); the reporter asks "What's the function of the Marxist?" The poet answers and the politics and homosexuality are brought together….

There are two loves, … of the boy ("a boy in his first loves is none other than the fecundity of the world"—that is, the future) and "another love: life through the centuries"—which is the same as the "fecundity of the world."

In another 1963 poem, "Plan of Future Works," Pasolini expressed the need for an alliance of minorities, and, as a homosexual and outsider, his solidarity with other outcast groups—such as blacks and Jews. Since Pasolini was an outsider, and grew more and more self-reliant, his relationship with homosexuality in Italy was different from what it might be here today. The drawing of homosexuals into a political and social group is part self-protection. Pasolini didn't have this kind of group situation in his Italy till late in his life, and by then he was such an opposer it is doubtful he would have joined for long. In America this tension between individual and group is usually tilted toward the individual, which makes organizing homosexuals difficult. But the less regulated homosexual life in Italy is fraught with the dangers of having a sexual life outside the homosexual circle. He seems to have been most attracted to young heterosexuals. This linked him to the general life in Italy—the point at which young men have left their parents and have not yet become parents, but will, as their mark of virility. His killer's reason for the murder is that he didn't want to be sodomized. Pelosi's refusal and subsequent crime and lenient punishment dovetail nicely. Sexually conventional or at least hypocritical society nods its head understandingly and gives the killer nine years.

I have seemed to stray far away from the original starting point, which was Pasolini's departure from hermeticism, and his celebration of free speech. But a, true coming out from hermeticism entailed this other, homosexual, coming out.

I can only guess how Pasolini's poems will affect American poetry and culture, since only a few of the poems have appeared in magazines….

Pasolini tends to concentrate not on things, as many moderns have—from Rilke to William Carlos Williams to Charles Simic—but rather on a general portrayal of the world—or at least an Italy not misrepresentative of the world in its conflicts and ideologies. And on a world full of people, whether the handsome teenagers maturing into mediocrity in "Reality" or the vulgar interviewer in "A Desperate Vitality."

Cinema as a mass art has affected all the other arts—the novel, the still photograph—and poetry has not been immune. Hart, Crane, Pound, Williams are early examples. Pasolini is the child not just of poetry but also of film. He wrote his first poem at seven and came into contact with both arts earlier than that. The films have outbursts of poetry—often verbal, as in Porcile, when Julian reveals his manias, in verse; and visual, in a directness that isn't documentary, in a subjectivity (the handheld camera). In the poems we have not only the obvious references of a film director in "A Desperate Vitality" but also the cinematic techniques in that poem's jump cuts, in the quick breathtaking shots of landscapes in "The Ashes of Gramsci" and the whole section of landscape writing in "The Tears of the Excavator" of 1956—a section that would be perhaps better filmed than written.

Pasolini, as word poet and film poet, dragged poetry further out of the cloister than any other great poet this century. In the poem "Reality," he defines the title word as the "practical end of my poetry" and later in a 1968 interview talks of his coming to film as an "explosion of my love for reality." In a sense his film poetry was the "practical end" of his verse poetry. His poetry will bring some shibboleths into American poetry: "reality," for one; another: "class struggle." The 3-decade-long debate he had with Marxism humanized the poetry. This type of debate has been almost impossible in American poetry because of the bias against ideas—especially Marxist ideas—in poetry and in society at large, which most poetry merely reflects.

A further link between Pasolini and Americans is their common effort at creating roots. His earliest published poems were in the dialect of Friuli; he founded an Institute of Friulian Language to further the regional culture in 1946, he later edited anthologies of regional folk songs.

The structure of the long poems is astounding. A poem like the 30-page "Religion of My Time" holds together amazingly well. Perhaps only in his last two films—Arabian Nights and Salò—are the structural feats as astonishing.

[From] "Reality," another major poem from 1963, [comes] the line "I am a free man." … [Three] pages after the line "I am a free man," there is this line, which should be taken much more as a simple description of the toll taken on one who is free than as a prophecy: "Free with a freedom that's massacred me."