Listening to the Billionaire Tell Us AI Is Just the Newest Tool That Everyone Will Benefit From by Joseph Fasano When men broke open the miraculous power of the atom, the first thing they did with it was deliver it into the hands of the schoolchildren of Hiroshima. Excerpt from our conversation with Joseph Fasano: KARAN Joseph, what a gift to have you in our pages. Your poems do one of the rarest things — they console without lying. “Maybe you were not born / on your knees” is the kind of line people carry into hospital waiting rooms, and I mean that literally, since your poems travel farther than almost any other poet writing today. Let’s start with that mode of address: the poem that speaks directly to a stranger in trouble. How did you come to it? JOSEPH Thank you, Karan. I think in some way I’m always writing for someone in trouble, someone going through a great trial, someone who has turned to poetry for deep soul-company in the wild thirst to stay alive. In some sense, that means I’m also writing to a part of myself. The poem you refer to came to me when I was struggling with some issues that really made me face my own mortality. I heard a voice saying, “Maybe what you need is the earth again,” and I listened, and I followed.
