Goddamned Selected Poems
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A couple of years ago Stanley Moss renewed his driver's license. Now in his late nineties, his license runs to his 104th year. He has produced such an immense volume of work in his long life that it seemed necessary for his readers, old and new, to essentialise this mass of work into a portable, liftable single collection of highlights, which these 200 pages represent. It has been hard to confine him to this limiting measure because he still, every week and sometimes every day, produces a wholly new poem, surprising his editor and also, always, himself. As he says in 'The Ocean Slaps my Face':
Yes, Poseidon, you may call me the F-word,
I'm a fluke and flounder.
I am a rogue wave, I am a rogue wave!
'Undaunted, outrageously alive,' Rosanna Warren said, 'Moss flaunts more colours than the Grim Reaper ever dreamed of, laughs in his face, rhymes with abandon, makes a joyful noise unto the Lord, and struts with Baudelaire.' He asks what John Ashbery called 'unthinkable questions, but when he formulates them, they take on the quiet urgency of common daylight'.
Stanley Moss was born in Woodhaven in 1925. He was educated at Trinity College and Yale University, and he enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II. His books are The Wrong Angel (1966), The Skull of Adam (1979), The Intelligence of Clouds (1989), Asleep in the Garden (1997), A History of Color (2003), Songs of Imperfection (2004), New and Selected Poems (2006), Rejoicing (2009), God Breaketh Not All Men's Hearts Alike (2011), No Tear is Commonplace (2013), It's About Time (2015), Almost Complete Poems (2016), Abandoned Poems (2018), God Breaketh Not All Men's Hearts Alike: New and Selected Poems 1948 – 2019 (2019), Act V, Scene I (2020), Not Yet (2021), Always Alwaysland (2022), and My Sporting Life (2022). He is translated into German by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, into Chinese by Fu Hao, and into Spanish by Valarie Mejer. He has taught in Italy, Spain, Japan, China, and Mexico.
Moss has worked as an editor at New Directions, Botteghe Oscure in Rome, New American Library, Bookweek at the New York Herald Tribune, and New American Review. In 1977, he founded Sheep Meadow Press, a non-profit publisher that publishes poetry and belles lettres. He makes his living as a private art dealer, largely in Spanish and Italian Old Masters. He lives in Clinton Corners, New York.