May 26

In Rotterdam I'm going to speak about the state of poetry on a panel with a Pole and a Turk. It's worth being alive to utter that sentence. A German from Furth, my father's home town and Henry Kissinger's, will preside. His name is Joachim Sartorius, which sounds like a pseudonym Kierkegaard might use to condemn the habits of his age and ours when nothing ever happens but the publicity is immediate and the town meeting ends with the people convinced they have rebelled so now they can go home quietly having spent a most pleasant evening