Nanni Balestrini was born in Milan on 2 July 1935. Although his mother was of German descent, his own intellectual heritage places him squarely within the tradition of the so-called Linea lombarda (Lombard Line)--a term coined by critic and poet Luciano Anceschi; however, such a poetic tendency has been mitigated to an extent by a dadaist vein, which has remained one of the peculiar aspects of Balestrini's art. While at the University of Milan he enrolled in the school of engineering, but his changing academic interests brought him to enter the faculties of economics and political science at the Università Cattolica, also in Milan. During this period he read the dadaists, as well as Guillaume Apollinaire, Bertolt Brecht, Ezra Pound, Carl Emilio Gadda, and, of course, the authors in the linea lombarda, particularly Luciano Erba; Balestrini was also actively interested in contemporary music and art. Shortly after Gillo Dorfles published some of Balestrini's poems in the journal MAC in 1945, Balestrini became a member of the group of poets who began to converge around Anceschi; by 1957 Balestrini had also published poems in Il Verri, the journal Anceschi had founded in the autumn of 1956.
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