1. Frederick Seidel 21 st Century Poet LIT 2030 Summer 2007 Rachel Brooks

2. Biography Born February 19, 1936 in St. Louis, MO Earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1957 Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize Awards include Lamont Poetry Prize and a PEN/Voelcker Award

3. Works Ooga-Booga – 2006 Life on Earth – 2001 The Cosmos Poems – 2000 Going Fast – 1998 My Tokyo – 1993 These Days – 1989 Poems, 1959-1979 – 1989 Et al.

4. “To The Muse” I’d had a haircut at Molé, I called you from the first payphone that worked, You were high above Park Avenue, Having damask troubles in their library. I saw the man approaching not see me. I held the phone and heard the servants getting you. I watched him squat in the street near the curb while the traffic passed, Spreading under himself sheets of newspaper; Cont.

5. “To The Muse”, Cont. Which when he rose he folded neatly And carried to the trash basket near the corner. Across the street where Mortimer’s outside tables set for lunch. Now the maitre d’ was seating an early customer, While a woman pushing a shopping cart Picked through the trash in the trash basket the man had used, And the butler finally came back To the phone to say you had gone.

6. Why Frederick Seidel? “Professor Jones, I don’t know where to start!” “Try Poets.org,” she said.

7. Poets.Org “Seidel's brutal and fearless work is frequently described in terms that are simultaneously praise and censure, depending on perspective, and often conflated with speculations about his notorious wealth, Italian motorcycles, and famous friends. "A violent misogynist*, or an elegant seducer, or both?" asks Adam Kirsch in The New Republic.” Poets.Org – 22 May 2007 Misogynist – one who hates women

8. The Contemporary Poetic Scene Brash, opinionated topics Edgy, abstract rhythms Use of real-life, modern metaphors Exposure of connections between ideas that do not necessarily relate Courage to write about controversial or private matters