The Pasolini Book

THE PASOLINI BOOK documents the poet Stacy Szymaszek's engagement with the work of the Italian film director, poet, and political figure Pier Paolo Pasolini alongside her own evolving vocation as civic poet and dissenting subject within an American polis by turns hostile and hospitable. Extending the exploration of the temporally unbound, genderqueer, and disaster-prone persona of her earlier works, this volume collects two successive iterations of "felt translations," poem-for-poem rewritings, channelings, and détournements, of Pasolini's Roman Poems, undertaken over a decade apart. Separating the two suites of poems are three iterations of autofiction titled "A Sentimental Education," in which Szymaszek's Midwestern upbringing is recentered and transformed through speculative identification with Pasolini. The Pasolini Book evidences a search for a civic poetry in which the poet does not contain multitudes so much as she exudes an abundant and experimental identity emerging from long experience seeking political and artistic solidarities on the margins of institutional life. "We are all in danger," Pasolini said in an interview only hours before he was murdered; today, in the midst of capitalist ruin, Szymaszek's poetry maps the particular pains of embattled artistic autonomy and the turbulent state of social and political community. Poetry. Italian Studies. Art. LGBTQ+ Studies.

Around 1980 in Rome, a small cooperative around film critics Michele Mancini and Giuseppe Perrella produced a mysterious, elaborate and yet seemingly effortless 600-page book of b&w photographs, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Corpi e Luoghi (1981). In the multifaceted cultural and political environment of the era, the publication was acclaimed an indispensable tool for future Pasolini (1922-1975) research. Although long since forgotten and out of print, Corpi e Luoghi, to this day, it remains what one reviewer called the most Pasolinian book to date. With its relentless and yet playful classification of some 2,000 film stills arranged under the categories of bodies and places, Mancini and Perrella stage an ever-shifting archival space. Some of the pictures recurring under various subcategories. With a hidden reference to Walter Benjamin and a correspondingly revolutionary attitude, quotation here is understood as a form of appropriation, as a practical application of specific material.

Now in paperback, a collection of the legendary filmmaker's short fiction and nonfiction from 1950 to 1966, in which we see the machinations of the creative mind in post-World War II Rome. In a portrait of the city at once poignant and intimate, we find artistic witness to the customs, dialect, squalor, and beauty of the ancient imperial capital that has succumbed to modern warfare, marginalization, and mass culture. The sketches portray the impoverished masses that Pasolini calls "the sub-proletariat," those who live under Third World conditions and for whom simple pleasures, such as a blue sweater in a storefront window, are completely out of reach. Pasolini's art develops throughout the works collected here, from his early lyricism to tragicomic outlines for screenplays, and finally to the maturation of his Neo-realism in eight chronicles on the shantytowns of Rome. The pieces in this collection were all published in Italian journals and newspapers, and then later edited by Walter Siti in the original Italian edition.

Before his mysterious murder in 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini had become famous—and infamous—not only for his groundbreaking films and literary works but also for his homosexuality and criticism of capitalism, colonialism, and Western materialism. In Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship, Gian Maria Annovi revisits Pasolini's oeuvre to examine the author's performance as a way of assuming an antagonistic stance toward forms of artistic, social, and cultural oppression. Annovi connects Pasolini's notion of authorship to contemporary radical artistic practices and today's multimedia authorship. Annovi considers the entire range of Pasolini's work, including his poetry, narrative and documentary film, dramatic writings, and painting, as well as his often scandalous essays on politics, art, literature, and theory. He interprets Pasolini's multimedia authorial performance as a masochistic act to elicit rejection, generate hostility, and highlight the contradictions that structure a repressive society. Annovi shows how questions of authorial self-representation and self-projection relate to the artist's effort to undermine the assumptions of his audience and criticize the conformist practices that the culture industry and mass society impose on the author. Pasolini reveals the critical potential of his spectacular celebrity by using the author's corporeal or vocal presence to address issues of sexuality and identity, and through his strategic self-fashioning in films, paintings, and photographic portraits he destabilizes the audience's assumptions about the author.

Most people outside Italy know Pier Paolo Pasolini for his films, many of which began as literary works—Arabian Nights, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales among them. What most people are not aware of is that he was primarily a poet, publishing nineteen books of poems during his lifetime, as well as a visual artist, novelist, playwright, and journalist. Half a dozen of these books have been excerpted and published in English over the years, but even if one were to read all of those, the wide range of poetic styles and subjects that occupied Pasolini during his lifetime would still elude the English-language reader. For the first time, Anglophones will now be able to discover the many facets of this singular poet. Avoiding the tactics of the slim, idiosyncratic, and aesthetically or politically motivated volumes currently available in English, Stephen Sartarelli has chosen poems from every period of Pasolini’s poetic oeuvre. In doing so, he gives English-language readers a more complete picture of the poet, whose verse ranged from short lyrics to longer poems and extended sequences, and whose themes ran not only to the moral, spiritual, and social spheres but also to the aesthetic and sexual, for which he is most known in the United States today. This volume shows how central poetry was to Pasolini, no matter what else he was doing in his creative life, and how poetry informed all of his work from the visual arts to his political essays to his films. Pier Paolo Pasolini was “a poet of the cinema,” as James Ivory says in the book’s foreword, who “left a trove of words on paper that can live on as the fast-deteriorating images he created on celluloid cannot.” This generous selection of poems will be welcomed by poetry lovers and film buffs alike and will be an event in American letters.

Riveting, obsessive, impassioned, and scandalous, here is a major biography of one of the great Renaissance men of the 20th century. Pier Paolo Pasolini was uncompromising, homosexual, anti-Fascist, anti-Communist, anti-clerical, even as he yielded to his callings as world-renowned novelist (A Violent Life, The Ragazzi), poet, polemicist, and filmmaker. Photographs. Avertising.

This is the story of Riccetto, a rascal among rascals, struggling to survive in the inhuman poverty of post-war Rome, a place of hunger, theft and prostitution.

In Danger reveals the literary life of internationally renowned filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini