Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini championed the little guy, the honest poor, those he called the “lumpen proletariat.” He never pretended to be one of them. A middle-class kid himself (his father was in the military), Pasolini moved to Rome after being fired from a teaching job in his hometown. He’d been charged with “corruption of minors and obscene acts in a public space.” They hounded him out of the Communist Party. My City Lights edition of Roman Poems is interspersed with black-and-white photographs of Pasolini in a trench coat, wandering industrial wastelands and housing estates. But he wasn’t full of shit. A committed and compassionate communist, Pasolini didn’t need the party. He was on the side of anyone who worked for a living, period.
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