A man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

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

When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal. And it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.

In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.

I was deeply moved by Richard Blanco's reading of his inaugural poem-a timely and elegant tribute to the great diversity of American experience. And now comes this fine meditation on his experience of coming to poetry, of making the poem and the months surrounding its making-a testament to the strength and significance of poetry in American culture, something not always seen or easily measured. Today Is For All of Us, One Today is a necessary intervention into the ongoing conversation about the role of poetry in public life.

You can get there from here, though there's no going home. Everywhere you go will be somewhere you've never been. "Theories of Time and Space

What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.