I wrote my first poems when I started college and fell in love with a high school girl who had friends that found me annoying. This was my fault—I’d go to a party, corner one of them and talk her ear off for half an hour. My listener would sort of accept this and sort of complain about it later to the girl. Here’s how I operated: I’d isolate my listener and tell her that her life was not going well at all, that it needed to change. I’d loved that girl for three years while I was involved with someone else, and maybe it was unconscious on my part, but I was going for a scorched-earth approach. Faced with her and her friends’ indecision, half paying attention to me, half rejecting me, I came up with the idea of writing these friends poems inspired by Nietzsche and Jünger. So all these kids—well-read high schoolers and grad students—all of them with a season theater ticket, got a poem from me, about the fact that they had no future, that due to conformism and their lack of will, they’d soon be defunct. I’d type up a poem, cut it out, glue it down on cardboard, draw on a daisy, and hand-deliver it to the person, like a love letter. One guy who hung out in that group (I hadn’t actually written him a poem, but he did get a hold of a couple, because my letters became notorious) said I was a poet. A few years after he graduated, he contacted me wanting to know if I still wrote: he was now on the editorial staff at a prestigious literary journal and remembered my nihilistic poems. I was just finishing my degree in political science; I liked to read and I had no clue what else I liked. I’d written some rap but quit because I didn’t like the rap scene. I was thrilled to receive this note—I wanted to do something—I was an aesthete, I was conflicted about religion, and I didn’t believe in the novel even if I was reading its most important examples; I felt like an artist. I submerged myself in a three-hour bath and reread my favorite poet, Guido Gozzano, then my favorite contemporary poet, Valentino Zeichen. I set a pad of paper on my bathtub bookrest that my parents had bought me because I was always reading in the tub. I left that bathroom with three poems about failure, about my directionless life; they were light, and they were warlike.

I was no expert on syllables and meter, but I did have an imagination, and those poems impressed my old acquaintance and his colleagues. They published them and showed them to Zeichen, who read them and very kindly suggested that we meet. We did, in Luigi Ontani’s studio, a real Wunderkammer, on a weekday afternoon, and it all seemed like the ideal I’d been pursuing ever since I was a teenager. Lounging around, contemplating. Hanging out. In the editorial office, I met writers and critics; later, these editors would give me books to review for my first ever newspaper pieces. At the literary journal, they realized I was meticulous and set me up to work with my friend, who’d been made assistant editor. My first jobs outside of this were with independent publishing houses, and eventually I was hired by the largest publisher of all.