Knowledge is, by its nature, always incomplete. “A scientist is never certain,” the scientist Richard Feynman reminds us. And neither, the poet John Keats would argue, is a poet. “Negative capability” was his term for the ability to dwell in uncertainty. My mother, a poet, has been instilling this ability in me since I was a child. “You have to erase yourself,” she says, meaning abandon what I think I know. Or “live the questions,” as Rainer Maria Rilke writes in his Letters to a Young Poet. This, my mother reminds me, is as essential to mothering as it is to poetry—we must live the questions
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