This message comes from Norton Young Readers of In Praise of Mystery from US Poet

Loria Aida Lamone and Caldecod honor-winning illustrator Peter Seis, a transcendent picture book featuring the poem that will travel into space aboard

NASA's Europa Clipper in praise of mystery, celebrates humankind's curiosity.

Asked us what it means to explore beyond our known world and shows

how the unknown can reflect us back to ourselves.

In praise of mystery is available wherever books are sold.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. Last year I returned to a notebook I started some years ago. It had a few poems in it that made me wince an embarrassment.

No one was around, but I laughed out loud.

They were full of sappy lines about life, capital L, meant to convey a deepness I'm sure I thought

made me different from my friends. When Modernist poet T.S. Elliot suggested that poets give up all the mushy gushiness of feelings

and find images to include in poems that correspond to felt emotion.

Poetry made a radical leap forward.

Elliot and his generation possessed a distaste for poetry that was sentimental, too excessive, too on the nose as we say.

Plus, a bunch of linguistic scholars would later theorize that language almost always misses its mark.

Inadequacy is built into the enterprise of speaking.

We struggle to say exactly what we need to say if we even know what we need to say.

So critics believe poets might as well lean into indeterminacy, embrace the limitations of language.

If you scratch your head in frustration at contemporary poetry, you can start with Elliot.

That scratching could also begin your journey to a new understanding of your life,

but it requires us to step away from poetry as merely a space where we reflect and share our feelings and come to see poetry as a place of exploration and metaphoric possibilities.

Today's shrewd poem materializes the rewards of speaking

through symbol and imagery.

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