A good poem invites us to experience or describe the world in a fresh, singular way, and so strengthens our ability to think and perceive anew. Whether as a writer or a listener, the exercise can change peoples’ minds—and ultimately, even change the world, suggests Jaswinder Bolina, associate professor and chair of both the English and Creative Writing Departments in the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences.
To help beginning students understand poetry’s basic thrust, Bolina often facilitates the following exercise.
“Wherever you’re seated in this room—or any space—there is something that you can see that no one else can see. Your job is to find that thing and describe it so that someone else can see it the way you see it,” Bolina explains. “Alternatively, there are things in this room that everyone can see, but you need to describe them in ways that only you can describe them to convey your unique perspective in a singular fashion.”
Bolina emphasized that he’s not using ablest terms to talk about “seeing,” but instead is urging students to use all their senses—smell, sight, sound, touch, and taste—to convey their unique experience. He cited the example of describing the sky.
“Everybody knows the sky is blue, but what’s a singular combination of words that you can bring to that subject to describe it?” he queried. “If you look for interesting juxtapositions of words, combinations that no one has read before—and it doesn’t mean they’re not understandable; they should still be apprehensible to any reader—then those small revisions in perspective help someone else begin to see something like the sky in a new way.
“In this way, poetry can change perspective and thinking, and with every little step you take, you introduce a new thought into someone else’s imagination—that’s how you change peoples’ minds,” he said. “And if you can change peoples’ minds, little by little, as ambitious as it seems, you can indeed change the world.”
Bolina was recently honored with the 2025 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, one of the most prestigious prizes in poetry today. He exercised this reimagining muscle throughout his most recent book, “English as a Second Language and Other Poems.”
“We see the phrase ‘ESL’ and have so many associations with it, whether it’s a class you take or teach or just the concept of English as a second language,” he said. “Tack on ‘and other poems’ and hopefully it recasts how we understand ESL—as in 'oh, he’s treating ESL as a poem, but how is this really familiar concept anything like poetry?’”
The compilation includes a poem that tells the story about the first time his father, who emigrated to London in the 1960s with limited understanding of English, ate hot dogs.
“They really thought that people were cooking and eating dog, and there was nothing to dispel them of that notion. All these people were standing around eating, and they were hungry and, it was like, it’s weird but we’ll try it,” Bolina explained.
“So, it becomes an experience in language, an experience in understanding and misunderstanding and renewed understanding. Each poem tries to take on a subject and find some new perspective,” he said.
What suggestions does he have for demystifying poetry?
“What I would say to a reader who has trouble with poetry is just read the words. Don’t worry about line breaks or rhyme schemes. Just read the sentences in the way that you read everything else, and ponder what the sentence is saying to you,” he suggested. “What is the subject or the fresh perspective on the subject that the poem is making evident to you?”
If you can’t find that one thing or you don’t understand it, maybe the poem just isn’t a good one, or maybe it’s telling you something that you already know such as that death is inevitable.
“Then it’s okay to be critical and say it’s not a very good poem, but be humble and receptive first. Just try to read the poem and ask yourself what the sentences are saying, what is being described and why?” Bolina said.
He encourages students who are writing poetry to learn as they write.
“If you don’t learn something while you’re writing the poem, your reader isn’t likely to learn anything either,” said Bolina, who highlighted that he follows that same approach. “I don’t often know where a poem is going or what it’s about, and that, to me, is the exciting part of the process,” Bolina said. “You hope that you land somewhere that you haven’t been before, somewhere new that offers a fresh perspective that you didn’t know you held.”
