appoint a poet laureate to our city, and this is going back to the previous administration, when lawrence ferlinghetti took the baton. he has now passed it on, officially, from jack kirsch men to diane as our fifth poet laureate. you would have thought that it must have gone on longer. but i am proud of it. as was jack, and i do not see him here, of his stewardship. jack and i did not always agree on every issue, and i went into this with some risk that i would be scorned even after appointing him. i would never have appointed him if i thought it would change his tenor. quite the contrary. i have admired him even more because he did an outstanding job as a steward of that position and really democratized the position even more reaching out into the neighborhood and also reaching out around the world in international issues, internationalizing our status. that is really important, raising the bar, also. he had a strategy of going deep into the community and broadening debt strategy in a broader context. i look for to extending that tradition which our new po gloria. i have had the privilege of reading