Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I am not the first, nor will I be the last to write poems in response to another writer's work. As Elaine Scarry wrote, beauty begets beauty. I don't know if my poems may be described as beautiful, but they are begotten by beauty. My poem "In Death As In Life" was written after Mary di Michele's translation of a poem by Pier Paolo Pasolini, that great Italian poet and filmmaker. Pasolini's poem speculates about the day of his death, how he would die and where, "in some city, Trieste or Udine," in di Michele's translation. The poem inspired me to make an important decision about my final resting place after living a migrant's life. I wanted to put on record the place to scatter my ashes. Di Michele has a special link to Pasolini as she explained in her book of response poems THE FLOWERS OF YOUTH. After reading the book, I wrote this review on my blog: You read up on a great writer and director, what he wrote and what others wrote about him...

I very much enjoyed reading last night for R. Nemo Hill and John Marcus Powell's series Reading Queerly!?. The Pink Pony was a wonderfully eclectic venue, though the music from the bar was a little loud. Met Ivan Steiger Galietti, who read two poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini in both Italian and English, one the supplication to his mother, the other a more political piece. Ivan said that he fell in love with Pasolini's poetry at the age of sixteen and met the great man himself in Rome. Lorenzo Pozzan read the beginning of Whitman's "Song of Myself" with much feeling. He is a very good-looking young actor. The open-mic was short but good, anchored by Nemo, John Marcus and Eric Norris. I sold two copies of Seven Studies and one copy of The Pillow Book .  Thank you, my friends, for coming to the reading--EN, TH, AH, R and AS. This is a reading series to which I will return, for its atmosphere of appreciative comaraderie.

In Death As In Life In some city, Trieste or Udine…             Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The Day of My Death,” translated by Mary di Michele Your mother wants her body donated to science, she wants             to be useful in death as she is in life,             to brain,             eye, uterus, and even skin researchers. She wants to be all used up. We are more selfish. You wish             to be cremated and for your ash to run across             the Great Lawn             we live by, lift off like a warm grey scarf         ...

You read up on a great writer and director, what he wrote and what others wrote about him. You find affinities in thought and temperament, though you live in different times and places. You fly to Italy for an academic conference and make the pilgrimage to the writer's grave at Casarsa. There, sitting on a bench shaded by cypress, weeping for a man you have never met, you hear a voice whispering to you in Italian, which you don't know how to write, but find yourself transcribing. Translated into English, the voice said, I leave the city and discover the sky, The world is bigger than I realized, Where there's nobody the stars are myriad. That was what happened to Mary di Michele, according to her book's prologue, and what inspired her to write The Flower of Youth.  The title is the same as that of the volume of verse Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote in dialect about his coming of age in the countryside during World War II. The verse that di Michele heard at Pasolini's...

The film opens with an announcement: a rich industrialist is giving up his factory to his workers. We learn later that Paolo does so after being seduced by a handsome young man, who as a guest at his villa also seduced his teenage son and daughter, his wife and his maid. The young man, played by Terence Stamp, could be God or the devil, but the encounter with him changes every member of the bourgeois family. The maid Emilia returns to the country, where she refuses to eat or drink, until two children cook a meal of roadside weeds for her. She is next seen by the villagers levitating miraculously above a house, before she is willingly buried alive, her tears feeding a puddle. The son Pietro turns to painting, to recapture the ecstasy of the encounter, but he knows every artistic attempt is a failure and a fake. The mother Lucia picks up young men in her car, and suffers sexual disappointments. The daughter Odetta falls into a comatose state, clutching what appears to be an object gi...

Watched Salò  (1975) last night. Found it to be as disturbing as it is reputed to be. I almost retched when the Duke forced one of the girls to eat his shit, with a spoon. The power of an image. My room may not be the cleanest place in the world, but it is not a pigsty. When the victims were treated to a banquet of feces, however, I could almost smell and taste their fare. Worse followed when they were tortured by scalping, branding, cutting of tongue and gorging of eyes, while the four Fascist libertines took turns to watch from a window. I looked at the victims through their torturers' binoculars. This update of Marquis de Sade was intended by its writer and director Pier Paulo Pasolini to be a critique of Italian Fascism. The Republic of Salò was the Fascist-occupied portion of Italy in 1944. The film began with the Duke, the President, the Bishop and the Magistrate giving their daughters to each other in marriage as a way of sealing their pact. But the visceral images of horr...

Uccellacci e uccellini (original title) is a comical, picaresque political allegory. A father and his son walking on a road meet a talking raven who tells them the story of how Saint Francis sent a pair of monks very like them to preach to the hawks and then the sparrows. Though the monks finally found a way to preach to the birds in their own languages, the gospel did not prevent the hawks from eating the sparrows. After that digression, the film reveals that the father is on his way to collect rent. His impoverished tenants are so poor that they eat boiled bird's nest (like the Chinese do, the wife said, in an allusion to the Chinese Communist Revolution) and keep their children in bed so that they don't have to be fed. Having to leave empty-handed, the father in turn is set upon by dogs when he cannot turn over any money to his rich landlord. Other episodes on the road enrich this otherwise deliberately simple tale. Father and son meet a group of circus folks at one poin...