THE LAST SONG OF THE WORLD BY JOSEPH FASANO Review by Nicole Yurcaba, Interview by Tiffany Troy

The Last Song of the World by Joseph Fasano 

Review by Nicole Yurcaba

Interview by Tiffany Troy

Publisher: BOA Editions

Publication Date: October 4 , 2022

ISBN: 9781960145352

Pages: 178

Over the Myths and Through the Chaos into the Beauty Below: A Review of Joseph Fasano’s The Last Song of the World by Nicole Yurcaba

The verses in Joseph Fasano’s The Last Song of the World fuse ancient history and mythology, and a view of modernity through an apocalyptic lens. The collection documents the world’s current descent into overwhelming violence because of wars and climate change. Nonetheless, as an attentive speaker imagines a better world in which peace and hope thrive, they also guide readers through various levels of spiritual, mental, and physical agony and remind them that the greatest gift to be found is the beautiful shards lying amid the world’s horrendous ruins.

Fatherhood is a paramount theme in Fasano’s poems. “Shadow Puppets” captures not only the awe and wonder fatherhood can bring to an individual, but also how fatherhood in the modern age challenges today’s men to be stronger fathers than those of previous generations. The poem captures a father and son at play—an integral part of social development that psychologists say current generations sorely lack due to technology’s encroachment on their lives. In Fasano’s poem, the speaker’s simple act of making shadow puppets becomes a memorable moment for both the son and the father. The father and son form “mythic things these wings, these / bears.” However, the act of creating shadow puppets together is also a way of “making / darkness beautiful.” The poem’s final line offers readers a philosophical tidbit that threads the book: “this knowing that our world is in our hands.” In reality, this single line captures the book’s ethos.

“Words Found in the Rubble After the Last War” speaks with a voice that reverberates with numerous current events, ranging from the war in Ukraine to the devastation and destruction of Gaza by Israeli forces. It opens with a keen sense of helplessness: “Yes, we lived in a time of darkness / and did nothing.” The individual’s ability to transform the future and their circumstances again emerges in this poem: “and we knew that we had made the flames / with our hands.” These lines are a call for responsibility, perpetuated by the repetition of the word “Yes” at the beginning of each stanza as well as the reliance on imagery of human hands, which occurs frequently throughout the collection. A dramatic turning point occurs in the fourth stanza as the speaker pleads, “Children, if  any of you have survived this, / start again.” The speaker advocates that the newer generations should begin anew “with the simplest things,” first and foremost the intimate interaction of touching “each other’s faces / in the morning air.” The poem’s call for a recognition of humanity is undeniable, and it echoes thematically with poems such as “Migration.”

Sleek in form and language, “Migration” arrives to readers at a critical moment in humanity when mass migrations due to climate change, war, famine, etc. force millions from their homes and native lands. “Migration” is a poem whose form matches its functions. The shortened lines which comprise the poem mimic the swiftness at which many are forced to leave their homes. The shortened line length emphasizes lines like “walk out” and “into burning.” Again, fire as a destructive yet rejuvenating force appears. The repetition of the word “burning” as the poem segues towards its ending, as well as the speaker’s utilization of words like “luminous” and “ruinous” create a sensation of emotional tumult that swirls readers forward and into the poem’s final line: “it would cast you out to where it had to go.” The phrase “cast you” forms a biblical tone in the line, and it also creates a sense of no-questions-may-be-asked finality.

Many of Fasano’s poems, nonetheless, challenge readers to look for and discover the beauty among life’s ruins and disappointments. “At Waverly Abbey” is one of the collection’s bravest poems. Again, the transformation that time and experience offer an individual are key elements in the poem, and they are elements as forceful as wind, fire, and water. The poem opens with a moment of defeat as the speaker observes that an unidentified “you” has “opened / to the spring wind, all of you / resounding with its power.” The speaker’s employment of the second-person address balances the word “resounding,” since the second-person address calls the reader to enter the poem as an immediate character. In this way, the reading experience becomes a transformative one, and Fasano’s poem leaps from the page to remind readers that reading poetry is a profoundly intimate, and experiential, moment. The action grows even more intimate as the speaker declares, “I promise you / your life is not in ruins” and affirms that “if it is” then the “truest” and “most beautiful part” yet to be discovered “is the ruins through which the mystery can sing.”

Fasano’s poems which incorporate mythological figures like Penelope and Odysseus surely sing with mystery and romance. Refreshingly, Fasano offers readers a new take on a well-worn myth that poets have told and retold ad nauseum in “Penelope and Odysseus.” The poem foregoes the typical rehashing of Penelope’s devotion and fidelity to Odysseus. The repetition of the phrase “Not the moment” encourages readers to look beyond what they already know about the tale and instead look at the one readers and observers would most likely overlook: 

                he stands face to face with only her
 		and takes off the last of his armor
 		and she comes to him and touches his shoulder.

The poem’s four concluding lines are undeniably golden:

 		History is what happens
 		when we step out of the myths
 		and see the real mess standing before us.
 		Love is what happens after that.

In these four lines, an observation of the past provides fruitful advice for the present as well as the future, and they ask readers to accept collective responsibility for the world’s irrevocably messy state and begin moving forward with a collective consciousness geared toward the betterment of humanity.
 
As readers end their journey through The Last Song of the World, what they realize about Fasano’s poems is that they are an amalgamation of the world's beauties and terrors, and they are maps through horrors, imaginings, and what-ifs. Most of all, these poems are glimmers of hope in a seemingly hopeless world, and they prove that Joseph Fasano is, by far, one of America’s most eloquent and necessary poets. 

it breaks / all laws / on earth:

A Conversation with Joseph Fasano about The Last Song of the World by Tiffany Troy

In his poem “Love Is Always a Radical,”in The Last Song of the World, Joseph Fasano writes of love, both romantic and spiritual: “it breaks / all laws / on earth.” This could serve as Fasano’s ars poetica, his rallying cry for poets, and for himself, to take the risk of what he calls “The New Passion.” Fasano’s latest collection stands for much of what Fasano writes of in heralding The New Passion, a movement in American poetics which decries the “institutionalization” of poetry and “trades the nihilism of cleverness for the vision and urgency of wisdom.” The New Passion, Fasano writes, “is a poetics that reaches out, with radical clarity, for the true democratic vision of art,” a poetics that is neither willfully obscure (which comes from fear of being seen) nor simply craftless (which comes from fear of not being seen),” and that knows “the mark of a sick age, which has fallen in love with its own chaos, is its fear of wisdom and clarity.” The dangers, as Fasano delineates, are many, and his poetry does not balk at a “charge of sentimentality,” because “the line between sentimentality and life-saving clarity is razor-thin, and the poet must risk it.” Fasano takes that risk, again and again, with a close attention to poetic craft that aims not to draw attention to itself but rather to the reader’s awakening, to the “extraordinary sharing of what’s common.”

This gesture of Fasano is indeed extraordinary, in large part because it asks us to treat “love” not as a word frequently tossed around in the name of American emotional demonstrativeness–at home, in the marketplace, or in the back of an Uber–but as a human connection in spite of, and perhaps because of, deeply personal struggles with mental illness, trauma, and a keen sensitivity to historical and contemporary disasters.

Joseph Fasano is the author of three novels: The Teacher (forthcoming from Maudlin House, 2025), The Swallows of Lunetto (Maudlin House, 2022) and The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020), which was named one of the “20 Best Small Press Books of 2020.” His books of poetry are The Last Song of the World (forthcoming from BOA Editions, 2024); The Crossing (Cider Press Review, 2018), praised by Ilya Kaminsky for its “lush drive to live, even in the darkest moments”; Vincent (2015), which Rain Taxi Review hailed as a “major literary achievement”; Inheritance (2014), a James Laughlin Award nominee; and Fugue for Other Hands (2013), which won the Cider Press Review Book Award and was nominated for the Poets’ Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award.” 

Tiffany Troy: How does “Sudden Hymn in Winter” set the readers up for what is to follow? To me, it immediately situates the collection in time (winter) and the centrality of poetry/ words/ music/ song. It also creates space for the inner voice of the speaker which arrives as a kind of epiphany, through love and seemingly without reason, thus situating it beyond logic.

Joseph Fasano: This small poem took me many years to write. What’s remarkable is that almost every day I get messages from people about that last line, sometimes saying simply, “Thank you.” Think about that: the amount of people out there who need to hear, “Your life is not a crime.” Something has gone wrong with the way we as a society are teaching our children what really matters. Poetry is a space where we can begin to hear the things we always needed to hear, but we need to make sure we’re saying these things to each other, and to ourselves, in life. In time.

TT: And I would like to thank you too. For a long time, after college, I had a iPhone cover that was “Letter,” which really carried me through the pandemic and in the years where I felt I was lost. I think that really speaks to the power of poetry in contemplating what it means to “walk out,” “look up” and want to change oneself, to transform into a greater being, whether under the moon or the lamp light.

Can you speak to your process of writing and putting together the collection? Many pieces are written for others, as almost epistolary poems of advice, while other poems hark back to your earlier collections, like Fugue in Other Hands, in exploring childhood, adulthood, and nature through myth and the myth that we make of ourselves.

JF: I think I’ve become more and more interested in writing not only in the second person but for or to the other person. I find myself wanting to do the impossible: write a poem that listens more than it speaks. Maybe that’s the ideal: a poem so open that it’s more a door than a wall, more a mirror than a portrait, more an echo than a song. I want to do my part to help us be a part of one other before it’s too late. I want to risk simplicity. I want to change. In my first print interview, more than a decade ago, I said, “All I want is to be opened.” I think I’m beginning to understand what that means.

So it moves me deeply to know my little poem “Letter” helped you, to know you’re open to what poems can sometimes almost do. Some people applaud themselves for repeating the cliche that says art is not meant to be “helpful.” But what’s needed is a deeper reflection on what “helpfulness” is. We all know art should honor the complexity of the human experience, and that includes the shadows and the filth and the thorn. But when another human being can put even those trials and briars into form, or find the form in them, what happens is a remarkable act of understanding between two beings–reader and writer–across space and across time. And that is cathartic. And that helps. There’s an infinite difference between what’s marketed as “self-help,” which is often reductive, and what risks everything to be open to itself and the other in the ancient faith that what’s made in the service of truth and love just might help another person survive. The latter is what I’m interested in writing. 

TT: I admire how brave your poems are, and how much it strives to listen and respond to that voice in us who tell us we are small, inadequate and alone. I have noticed how throughout the collection, certain words repeat themselves insistently in recurring motifs of searching. Repetition of course is a hallmark of poetry and I’m wondering if you could speak to how invocation functions to cohere within specific poems or the collection overall.

JF: You’re absolutely right: my poems are deeply concerned with ritual. I think a poem is a space in which we can prepare ourselves to listen to what Seamus Heaney called “the music of what happens.” Call it truth. Call it beauty. Call it God. Our task is to listen. I think the poem can be a record of a human mind attempting to reach that place of attention, and so it can preserve some of the gestures by which it prepared itself. It can be honest about the prayer that it is.

I’ll also add that a poet’s willingness to repeat, revise, ritualize, etc., can be a resistance to the commercialism that demands that the writer produce novelty instead of depth, product instead of process. A writer’s task should be to go into his obsessions, to emerge from them when the voice commands it, to follow the will of the spirit. These are old-fashioned words, aren’t they? Not to me. They’re tremblingly alive.

TT: The ideal of course is if the form and the content are one. Who are some of your literary predecessors that you look toward in writing in different poetic forms and do you have any tips for poets who are struggling to find form that fits what they’re trying to say or to say what they mean within the constraints of form?

JF: I feel I’ve breathed in the works of many poets, a very diverse chorus of voices, and each one has helped me find a part of my own work. Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example, wrote in an entirely inimitable way, but his passion and precision inspire me, even if my aesthetic calls for a very different diction and prosody. Being influenced by a writer is as complicated as being in love, so perhaps I should just name some lyric poets whose poems I’ve loved (I’ll limit myself to ten): George Herbert, Federico Garcia-Lorca, Louise Gluck, T. S. Eliot, Robert Hayden, Georg Trakl, Franz Wright, Frank Stanford, Mark Strand, and Rainer Maria Rilke. 

TT: Can we turn next to the new movement, “A New Passion”?

JF: Sure. It’s simply a way of naming what I believe in: that the poetry of our time needs to turn away from the defenses of irony and cleverness and toward the urgency of passion. We need a poetics that reaches out, with radical clarity, for the democratic vision of art, a vision which has despite all protest to the contrary been largely abandoned. We don’t need craftless Instagram lyrics or preening cleverness. We desperately need poems that–through a freshness of voice, and through the use of real poetic craft that is so fine-tuned that it becomes transparent– bring back the ancient things that can restore us: love, grace, compassion, witnessing, listening. Because clarity is not simplicity. It is mystery. Mystery. And, as Lorca once said, “only mystery lets us live.”

TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers?

JF: Only that I love you.

Joseph Fasano is the author of three novels: The Teacher (forthcoming from Maudlin House, 2025), The Swallows of Lunetto (Maudlin House, 2022) and The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020), which was named one of the “20 Best Small Press Books of 2020.” His books of poetry are The Last Song of the World (forthcoming from BOA Editions, 2024); The Crossing (Cider Press Review, 2018), praised by Ilya Kaminsky for its “lush drive to live, even in the darkest moments”; Vincent (2015), which Rain Taxi Review hailed as a “major literary achievement”; Inheritance (2014), a James Laughlin Award nominee; and Fugue for Other Hands (2013), which won the Cider Press Review Book Award and was nominated for the Poets’ Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award.” 

Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press, Lit Gazeta, Chytomo, Bukvoid, and The New Voice of Ukraine. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University, and is the Humanities Coordinator at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books.

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.

8 January 2024