Have you ever felt an intense desire to enter a landscape that no one on Earth has ever experienced before?

If so, you might be describing a poem. Creating a poem is an act of exploration, as well as a testament to hope. While I’m scribbling, I have no way to know whether anyone else has ever explored exactly these same thoughts and feelings, despite the universal nature of so many poetic subjects and styles. Poets can be shy and quiet, but we are also adventurous.

My mother is from Trinidad, Cuba, and my father was from Los Angeles, California. They fell in love at first sight when he traveled to Trinidad after seeing photos in National Geographic magazine. He only spoke English, and she only spoke Spanish, but they were artists, so they communicated by passing sketches back and forth. After they were married, she moved to Los Angeles, where my sister and I were born and raised. We were the only Cuban Americans in our neighborhood, and in our school. Poetry from Cuba was a comfort to my mother, and she passed its hopeful music along to me.

When I was little, I loved listening to la poesía de José Martí, los Versos sencillos — the Simple Verses of Cuba’s most beloved poet. My mother recited them from memory. Later, after I learned to read English, she took me to the Arroyo Seco library in Los Angeles every Saturday and allowed me to check out as many books as I could carry. I balanced a tower of poetry, stories, and travel books in my arms, ready to explore.

Soon I was brave enough to compose my own verses while walking, matching the language to the rhythm of my footsteps. Poetry helped me feel happy, even when the subject was sad, troubling, or confusing. Poetry still helps me feel peaceful, and, in fact, it helps me feel joy. Perhaps that’s because poetry is musical language, and because poetry is so personal. Even when there is no rhyme, there is a rhythm of movement — heartbeats, hoofbeats, wind, or flowing water. Lyrical verses also contain melodies that remind me of bird songs, wordless mysteries that seem to alter time, making me feel like I belong to centuries, millennia, and geologic eras, instead of just the few decades of my own life.

Much of the music in poetry emerges from open spaces between lines and stanzas, rather than from the words themselves. In this sense, poetry is interactive. Those open spaces hold echoes of the words, like the resonance after ringing a bell. The minds and emotions of poets and readers rise up and meet in midair, within those open spaces. They are an invitation to all readers to write their own verses.

Some of my favorite ways to find the music in words is by using internal rhymes within lines of verse, rather than rhymes at the ends of lines. I also love assonance, or vowel rhymes, and I love words that almost rhyme, instead of rhyming precisely. Metaphors and similes are by nature musical in the sense that they call us back to our ancestral times of storytelling. News, ideas, and legends were passed along in the form of songs chanted around a fire, beneath stars that formed constellations which, in turn, told their own stories.

Because poetry is personal, no two poets interpret a subject in exactly the same way. That is why I hope teachers will ask students how a poem makes them feel, instead of asking what the poem means. Isn’t it true that a poem might mean different things on different days, depending on a reader’s emotions? In fact, a poem might have different meanings in the poet’s own mind as time passes, seasons change, and experience offers new insights.

Reading voraciously is the first step toward fulfilling any dream of being a writer. Curiosity guides readers through the towering mountains and deep canyons of every library. Poetry is a wild creature who roams the forested shelves made of paper borrowed from trees. The shape of the tree has changed, but growth is still contained within those pages. I hope young people will read so widely that they eventually feel inspired to write their own verses. There is no greater adventure.