Photo Credit: Professor Fasano
To most people it is coffee that wakes them up in the morning, but for Professor Fasano it is poetry. Professor Joseph Fasano teaches Poetry, First-Year Seminar and First-Year Writing at Manhattanville College. He also teaches at Columbia University. He has earned a BA from Harvard University, and an MFA from Columbia University.
A New York native, Fasano is from a small town in Goshen, New York which is in Orange County. The town he grew up in was very rural. He owned some horses and kept them in a barn up the street. Some of the images from his hometown have influenced his poetry as he states that “Many of the images in my poems come from the archetypal place. So the images of animals, wild things. These certainly have roots in my own life, but they also have resonances beyond my external experiences.” Fasano is constantly exploring the idea of “tensions.” One of his tensions he states is his feeling of being “in between spaces,” being from the country, but also from the city. This is an idea that he constantly explores.
Fasano is not the type of man you would imagine to have started out studying mathematics and physics. (He is also not the type of man you would imagine to ride a motorcycle, but he does.) At one point, he switched his studies from mathematics to philosophy, in search of a new way of thinking. “. . .And in a way studying the philosophy that I did helped change my thinking so that it kind of liberated me; instead of thinking about what we are looking for beyond us, I became more interested in how we talk to each other, what is within the framework of human understanding and how every perception is shaped by the perceiver. It changed my relationship to meaning, to truth and language. It changed my framework of thinking about them.”
One philosopher that he was moved by when studying philosophy at Harvard was Ludwig Wittgenstein. “The meaning of the word is its use in the language,” has deep resonance with Fasano. He states that, “It liberated me.”
The writer has been inspired by a number of people. After studying philosophy he was shaped by a few poets including James Wright, Richard Howard and Mark Strand. James Wright taught him an important aspect of poetry which is its use of imagery. Richard Howard and Mark Strand were teachers of his who influenced his work indirectly. “Poets have a way of helping other poets without necessarily influencing the style of their poems, and my greatest teachers have just helped my poems try to become whatever they needed to become. For that I will always be grateful.”
Some might call Fasano gifted, others might call him plain genius. Fasano is the winner of the RATTLE poetry prize, Missouri Review Editors’ prize finalist, Poets’s prize nominee, and he has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of Fugue for Other Hands, Inheritance, and Vincent.
His most recent work, Vincent, which is probably one of his most controversial, is in the voice of a character based on Vince Li, who beheaded a man on a Greyhound bus in 2008. Fasano worked on this particular book for five years and for three of those years he couldn’t even formulate an answer as to why he was writing it. Now, he can though.
“I am interested in the tension we as readers experience when we confront a human voice, which we can relate to because of its humanity, and the content of that voice, which at times can be so inhumane that we cannot relate to it. That to me is really interesting.”
In many works of literature, an author attempts to explore a different voice in order to investigate a certain meaning in human culture. Fasano does just that in Vincent. “These are actual questions that I think about but they are blown up to monstrous proportions. So it’s questions about how do we talk to each other, the infinite gaps that we try to cross between each other, the moments where we really do connect to each other—tenderness, violence, the kinds of things that happen on a smaller scale everywhere.”
If there’s anything that you should know about Professor Fasano it’s that writing is essentially what shapes him as a living, breathing human.
“I give all my creative energy to writing.”