Answer: Frederick Seidel.

The Epstein story features not only an Epsteinian Harvard president; it features an Epsteinian poetry professor. ‘[Elisa] New discussed her personal projects at length with Epstein, soliciting thousands of dollars in funding from the child sex trafficker several times — years after Harvard said it had stopped taking contributions from Epstein.’ Indifferent, it seems, to his criminality, New excitedly praised and delighted in Epstein in her solicitation emails to him. She was happy – desperate, even – to take his money. She visited Pedo Island, as it was later known, on her honeymoon in 2005, traveling there with Ghislaine Maxwell.

One can only hope that among the poets New sought to tell her audience about was the man of the American Elites hour, Seidel, who rhapsodizes about – in the lilting alliterative words of New’s husband, Summers (in an email exchange with Epstein) – “life among the lucrative and louche.”

Maybe it seems difficult to you – poetizing the selfish lecherous arrogance of the obscenely rich one percent – but Seidel shows that it can be done. The muse of the money masturbators, the bard of the brackish, he versifies “his penchant for hand-built Ducati motorcycles, sex with much younger women, and expensive hotels.”

Let us consider one of his poems, “Widening Income Inequality.”

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I live a life of appetite and, yes, that’s right,

I live a life of privilege in New York,

Eating buttered toast in bed with cunty fingers on Sunday morning.

Say that again?

I have a rule—

I never give to beggars in the street who hold their hands out.

I woke up this morning in my air-conditioning.

At the end of my legs were my feet.

Foot and foot stretched out outside the duvet looking for me!

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

My feet were there on the far side of my legs.

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

I don’t really think I am going to.

Obama is doing just fine.

I don’t think I’m going to.

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

I can see out the window it isn’t raining.

So much for the endless forecasts, always wrong.

The poor are poorer than they ever were.

The rich are richer than the poor.

Is it true about the poor?

It’s always possible to be amusing.

I saw a rat down in the subway.

So what if you saw a rat.

I admire the poor profusely.

I want their autograph.

They make me shy.

I keep my distance.

I’m getting to the bottom of the island.

Lower Broadway comes to a boil and City Hall is boiling.

I’m half asleep but I’m awake.

At the other end of me are my feet

In shoes of considerable sophistication

Walking down Broadway in the heat.

I’m half asleep in the heat.

I’m, so to speak, wearing a hat.

I’m no Saint Francis.

I’m in one of my trances.

When I look in a mirror,

There’s an old man in a trance.

There’s a Gobi Desert,

And that’s poetry, or rather rhetoric.

You see what happens if you don’t make sense?

It only makes sense to not.

You feel the flicker of a hummingbird

It takes a second to find.

You hear a whirr.

It’s here. It’s there. It hovers, begging, hand out.

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Abed, lazy, post-coital, airconditioned, the poet describes his constant trance-state, barely awake even when he eventually goes out to the hot city streets. Infantile, he contemplates at length his feet and their habit of being at the bottom of his legs, and though he tells them to giddyup, they just lie there. Why should he go anywhere? The president is running the country just fine, maintaining the poet’s life of privilege. He thinks maybe – who knows? who cares? – the poor are getting poorer, but for him they represent celebrities, dramatis personae in a play about poverty whose autographs he covets. They’re not real. He admires his fancy shoes as he walks.

He notes, laconically, that he’s no Saint Francis, who gave up his personal wealth to live among the poor; au contraire, he could care less. Nor does it bother him that he himself is a big fat nothing, a Gobi Desert, though maybe he could make something poetic of that comparison… yawn… wake me up when this poem’s over…

And as for nature. As for the beauty of the natural world… that’s all beggars again. A world of people and animals holding out their hands to you asking for food or money or whatever… Fuck them. I live a life of appetite too, but mine is satisfied.