From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.

I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.

Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief.

The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.