SOURCE: "'I Am a Free Man': Pasolini's Poetry in America," in Italian Quarterly, Vol. XXI and XXII, No. 82-83, Fall/Winter, 1980–81, pp. 99-105.

In the following essay, MacAfee discusses the relationship between Pasolini's poetry and American culture and art.

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...