When I was ten I decided I wanted to be a writer.
There is no particular reason why that happened - I remember looking at the white pages of a note book and thinking that I really felt like filling those pages. It was a mixture of excitement and sadness - because I remember thinking that those white pages were waiting to fulfill their destiny. Though I suspected my output might not be the best those pages could do, I still felt that doing nothing was wrong.
The first thing I wrote was a fantasy story. The baddie was called Singer- after my mother's sawing machine. It is the usual hero tale (the hero was called Erik, with a K) with a twist: at the end you realised that the quest Erik has completed to allegedly kill Singer was actually designed to free Singer from his prison - genius. At the end Erik realises that all the people he has eliminated on his way had been good guys trying to stop him from doing the wrong thing.
I wrote my first poem when I was 13. It was an atrocious mess called 'Life' (La vita). For some reason I shared it with my Religion teacher at school - a priest whose name escapes me now. Don Something.
He never commented on it.
Other gems include the short book written by my late good friend Misael and I. It was called 'Perhaps' (Forse) and it was the story of a group of friends that grow up together and then meet again as adults. It is meant to be a delightful weekend in a cottage in the middle of the Italian mountains. Unfortunately one of them is totally nuts and tries to kill them all off. It was actually a good story, and I quite liked the way it highlighted the fact that sometimes when you share something really intense with someone the price to pay for that sense of belonging and closeness can be quite ugly.
It is only when I started studying modern Italian literature at school (Ungaretti, Montale, etc) that I felt compelled to take my writing hobby more seriously. It occurred to me that poetry could do something very special: it could take pictures with words. Like good pictures it required some sort of structure, tone, harmony. The Italian language offers a number of poetical structures, which all fall under the discipline of
rhetoric. I immediately liked the way you could use number of syllables, rhymes and other stuff to create that tone and musicality to accompany the 'picture'. Rhetoric can then be seen as a medium rather than an old fashioned tradition. It is the instrument that created the music to accompany the picture.
And like good picture the best bits are the ones that are not immediately evident when you look at them. They just 'become' in the eye of the observer, telling them all those things that exist behind the surface.
It is the same of looking at a painting and feeling a certain way even though you don't know why.
I like writing poems where all the verses are visual snaps that tell stories that words cannot tell. Somebody who wrote a review on a poem of mine once said something nice, she said that my verses defy the boundaries of tradition. I had not quite realised until I read that review that that was I had been trying to do without knowing.
Some great teachers have helped me along the way, like Gabriella. Beside being a great teacher she is also a successful writer. She always believed I could do well, and pushed me by introducing me to some great writers, taking me to Rome on a TV show and other ways. She was very disappointed when she found out I was to become a mathematician.
My greatest inspirations include Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby and Eugenio Montale's Ossi di Seppia. All of them share an anachronistic view of the world which I have found compelling. The opening line of Mrs. Dalloway to to date to me is one of the greatest strokes of genius.
Over the years I have written a few things. My prose has ranged from amateurish to ok to crap (of note my first English novel- The Categorical Imperative- none of my friends managed to read more than a few pages and to be honest I cannot really blame them).
However, my poetry has done well. I started writing poetry regularly in May 1997. I know it because my first 'new gen' poem was called 'May'. Since then, for a few years, I wrote a lot. It was my way to say things I did not want to talk about.
My mother - or shall I say my agent- kept finding stuff I had written and entering poetry contests for me.
The poem that got me most recognition was Amico Re (King Friend), The title comes from a note my school mate wrote on my year book in 1999. The poem is about the end of boarding school, and the final acts of all the dramas that took place on the Rilke path. I won quite a few first prizes in national contests with that poem - the funny thing being that none of the judges, and perhaps myself included - really know what those verses really mean.
