Not Yet: Poems on China Two Raw Fish Poems from Japan American Poems Seasoned with Chinese Experience & New Poems, November - June 2021

by Stanley Moss

Overview

Not Yet by Stanley Moss is best described metaphorically: it is a freight train loaded with poetry that includes Poems on China (Stanley Moss taught English in China thirty years ago), a compartment of Two Raw Fish Poems from Japan, then there's an extra long boxcar, a lifetime of American Poems Seasoned with Chinese Experience. Finally, there's the club car, Not Yet, a section of new poems written June 20th 2020 - May 1st 2021. Not Yet includes a preface by Stanley Moss, an afterword by Fu Hao, visiting scholar of Chinese at Cambridge University. Much of the book will be translated by him into Chinese for the many millions of Chinese who read English poems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644211274
Publisher:	Seven Stories Press
Publication date:	09/07/2021
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.66(w) x 9.27(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Born in New York City, STANLEY MOSS was educated at Trinity College and Yale University. He has been writing poetry for over a half-century. In addition, Moss is a private art dealer specializing in Italian and Spanish old masters, as well as the publisher and editor of The Sheep Meadow Press, a non-profit publishing house devoted to poetry. Moss lives in Clintondale and River Corners, New York.

Table of Contents

Foreword Willis Barnstone 9

Preface 13

Poems on China

The Hawk, the Serpent, and the Cloud 17

April, Beijing 18

Chinese Prayer 20

On Trying to Remember Two Chinese Poems 21

Letter to an Unknown 23

Alexander Fu 24

Alexander's First Battle 24

Alexander Fu Musing 25

Alexander Fu to Stanley 26

Letter to Alexander Fu, Seven Years Old 27

To Angelina, Whose Chinese Name Means Happiness 28

To Alexander Fu on His Beginning and 13th Birthday 29

To Alexander, Who Wanted to be a Cosmologist 30

To Alexander Fu on His 18th Birthday 31

Thanksgiving 2020 33

Year of the Rooster 35

Year of the Monkey 37

In Zigong, Salt City of China 38

Loushan Pass by Mao Zedong 39

Loushan Pass Translation by Willis Barnstone 40

Murder 41

China Poem 44

Two Raw Fish Poems on Japan

The Poem of the Pillow 46

The Decadant Poets of Kyoto 48

American Poems Seasoned With Chinese Experience

For Margaret 50

The Lost Brother 52

Nicky 53

The Bathers 54

Song of Imperfection 56

When I Played a Buddhist Priest, Etc. 57

Hermaphrodites in the Garden 59

The Swimmer 60

Spoon 62

The Debt 65

In The Swim 67

Sleep 70

The Meeting 71

Squall 71

Listening to Water 72

Clams 73

Krill 74

Peace 75

Frog 76

Vanitas 77

Lost Daughter 78

Beauty is Not Easy 79

Walking 80

Prayer 82

Song of Alphabets 83

Delmore Schwartz 85

Visiting Star 86

Clouds 87

They Plow Their Father's Field 88

The Grammarian 89

For my Godmother, Twenty Years Later 89

March 21st, First Day of Spring 90

Pax Poetica 91

My History of Laughter 92

Not Yet: Poems August 2020 - May 2021

Not Yet 98

A Smiling Understanding 99

Today is Yesterday, Tomorrow and Now 100

Dog Sonnet 101

After Receiving a Letter 103

I Write to Be Read Out Loud 104

I Miss Naomi Etienne 105

I'm Sorry 106

Looney Tune 107

There is Secret Meaning in Rhymes 110

Contra Goya 111

A Rum Cocktail 112

The Inconsequential, A Paper Napkin 113

The Legend of Self 2021 115

Cake Mistake 118

Some Words for T.R. Hummer 119

Whim 121

A Prayer to No God for Ilhan Comak 122

Disappearance 124

Happy 55th Birthday to Angel, From Stanley 126

A Show 127

Another Birthday Poem, Written When Angel Was Almost a Day Older 128

Truth or Consequences 130

A Charming Story 133

I Don't Trust Alarm Clocks 135

Eye 137

Abortion 139

Zoopie 140

A Scream 141

My Hearts Cousin 142

Numbers 143

Trick 144

A Butterfly With Child 145

A Cup of Tea 146

Reflections 147

Gods of Snow, It's Been Snowing All Day 149

The Ferryman 151

I Don't Celebrate the Body Today 153

I Speak While Others Sleep 157

Today I Play Ring Around the Rosie 158

Barbershop Conversation 160

I Praise Scientists 161

A Fable: Christ's Eagle Fathered Eagles 162

Ode to Opposites 165

Spring 2021 167

Little Song 170

Year 171

Preface II 173

Fact Song 174

If Someone Makes Love Anywhere on Earth 175

Detour 177

Haiku 179

A Little Afternoon Music 179

The great god IS 181

Afterword Fu Hao 183

Recalling the Past that We Have Been in Heaven and Hell 188

Editorial Reviews

"I have been enjoying Stanley Moss’s work ever since his first collection The Wrong Angel finally reached England in 1969. He is one of those very rare poets who have got better and even better as they have grown older, as the experiences of life accumulate and are interrogated and blessed by them. Ever since Whitman, America has now and again produced a poet who can celebrate the abundance of life with joy and inquisitive detail, laying his soul out naked on the page. Moss is one of these. He is moving, surprising and funny, with a relaxed free style that can catch you off guard and tell you things that you didn’t know you half-knew. The new book is full of this infectious eagerness to catch things before they go, in a spirit of “not yet” that is not only a beautiful defiance but a kind of mysticism of the bodily life, an ambition to redeem the world before he is required to leave it."
—John Fuller

“Magisterial. . . . This book is magnificent. I've read it several times with greater and greater pleasure. Its verbal generosity and bravura, its humanity, the quality and quantity of information which it generates into poetry of the highest order make it a continuing delight.”
—Marilyn Hacker

“Like any sensible person, I've been reading Stanley Moss's poetry for many years, during which time the force of his work . . . has never diminished an iota. In our epoch of turmoil, crisis, and grief, I find Moss's poetry still, always, brings me a little closer to happiness.”
—Forrest Gander

“In Not Yet it seems each poem has been searching for a master architect and wordsmith with deep feeling and practice to say it right. The profound and mischievous topics seem to be saying to a foreboding modern reality that Stanley Moss, a mature poet who dares to get the questions and the answers right, that the masterplan engages only true feeling in a state of playful wisdom.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa

"Open Not Yet or any of Stanley Moss's books anywhere, and you will come shockingly upon wisdom and beauty, a diversity of styles—a unity of voice, a voice that was there since the begninning. I love Stanley Moss's work. The pace, the strategy, the wit, the knowledge are astonishing. Of the generation that is gradually leaving us, those born in the mid- and late-1920s, he has a prominent place. He loves donkeys. He owns Ted Roethke's raccoon coat. He is an original."
—Gerald Stern

"Moss rewrites the received idea of religion and the religious poet: his psalms may be exactly the new songs needed to illuminate sombre new times."
—Carol Rumens, The Guardian

From the Publisher