At 20 he enlisted and was sent to fight in the Korean War where he eventually suffered a nervous breakdown due to battlefield trauma and was honorably discharged.
After attending a writing workshop he met the poet Louis Zukofsky, who became an early mentor and also introduced him to Cid Corman.
There the connection with Corman was renewed and resulted in his poems being championed in Origin (magazine) and published in limited editions from Kyoto.
In the early 1980s Samperi moved to Sun City, Arizona, but declining health prevented him from writing much more before his death at the age of 58.
His early poetry was a luminous notation of things seen, pared down in language and form – This laid the groundwork of an eventual religious vision based on Dante's Divine Comedy and the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.