Moss, Stanley 1979
When you said that you wanted to be useful
as the days of the week, I said, “God bless you.”
Then you said you would not trade our Mondays,
useful for two thousand years,
for the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
– Stanley Moss, “An Argument”
Watch Stanley Moss read some of his poetry:
Stanley Moss reads ‘Song of Alphabets’, ‘Paper Swallow’, and ‘Pslam’
American poet Stanley Moss reads three of his poems from his collection No Tear is Commonplace, published by Carcanet Press (2013). Available here http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781847772503 The poems collected in No Tear is Commonplace stage a passionate, curious, and often combative relationship with the world and the forces that shape human life and death.
Some of the self-containment of my old face
has been sandblasted away. The “yellow wind”
is blowing and my mouth and face burn
from the Gobi dust that scorches the city
after its historic passage over the Great Wall.
When I was young, I hosed the Atlantic salt
off my body, the salt was young too.
– Stanley Moss, “April, Beijing”
Read an article on Stanley Moss:
The Joke’s on God
In Rejoicing: New and Collected Poems, Stanley Moss’s recently published collection, Moss quotes Baudelaire’s sly aphorism: “God is the sole being who has no need to exist in order to reign.” For more than 40 years, Moss has been addressing that sole being without worrying whether He exists or…
