The Doorway I Can’t Enter

I have always believed words are tools before they are treasures. A hammer can be beautiful, sure, but only insofar as it drives the nail where it needs to go. This belief has served me well in prose. Give me a story, a memory, a grief, a love—I can build something solid from it. Beginning, middle, end. A door you can walk through.

Poetry, on the other hand, has always felt like a hallway with no doors. Or worse: a doorway everyone else insists is open while I keep bruising my nose on the wall.

In college, I learned early that poetry was not a phase you passed through so much as a place you either lived or did not. The poets among us spoke a different dialect. They discussed line breaks the way carpenters discuss grain, talked about white space like it was oxygen. Meanwhile, the prose writers sat together whispering, half in jest and half in fear, about what we called the Poetry Dimension—a mythical realm accessible only to those who could extract meaning from fragments and call it communion.

The poets thrived there. They published chapbooks with covers the color of rainclouds. Professors spoke about their work with reverence. I flipped through those chapbooks in the quiet corners of the institute and felt nothing but a growing suspicion that I was missing a frequency everyone else could hear.

It wasn’t ignorance. I had read poetry. I had studied it, critiqued it, even judged it. One summer, due to administrative coincidence and my unfortunate availability, I was asked to give feedback to hundreds of teenage poets for a university magazine. Hundreds of poems crossed my desk like messages in bottles. I tried—truly tried—to respond thoughtfully. But eventually every comment began to sound the same: These are certainly words, and you have arranged them intentionally.

I knew how inadequate that was. I just didn’t know what else to say.

What unsettled me most was not that poetry failed to move me, but that it made me feel guilty for not being moved. As if the failure was moral rather than aesthetic. As if I were standing before a painting everyone else found transcendent and admitting, quietly, that it looked like spilled paint.

Maybe the problem is scale. Poetry asks you to feel everything all at once, compressed into a handful of lines. Prose allows room to breathe, to arrive gradually at meaning. I like being led by the hand, not dropped into the ocean and told to appreciate the temperature.

My favorite song lyric of all time proves this, I think. From The Mountain Goats: “The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you, and that you’re standing in the doorway.” There is nothing fancy there. No acrobatics. Just a statement so plain it hurts. And yet it devastates me every time. That doorway is real. I can see it. I can stand in it with the speaker. That’s the kind of magic I understand.

Free verse rarely offers me that door. Instead, it fractures thought, splinters it across the page. I’m told this is intentional, that the gaps matter as much as the words. But if I did that in a short story—broke a sentence in half for vibes—I would be escorted out of the workshop with pitchforks.

When I write poetry myself, it is either out of obligation or vanity. A sonnet, carefully measured, to prove I can control language if I want to. Free verse, only when a competition requires it. Even then, I feel like I’m cosplaying insight, wearing the costume of a poet without ever believing I’ve crossed into their world.

So maybe I never will. Maybe the Poetry Dimension is not a failing on my part but a boundary. Not every writer has to go everywhere. Maybe my work is to build rooms people can enter, not atmospheres they have to decipher.

Or maybe poetry really is a closed loop, a conversation that mostly rewards those already fluent in its codes. I hesitate to say that out loud—it sounds bitter—but I notice how often the loudest praise comes from those already invested in the system. Workshops praising workshops. Journals praising journals. An ecosystem that sustains itself beautifully without ever needing me inside it.

And yet, I don’t hate poetry. I admire it the way one admires deep-sea creatures: strange, luminous, entirely unsuited to my environment. I assume it does important work down there. I just don’t plan on holding my breath long enough to find out.

So the poets will keep poeming, and I will keep writing sentences that walk in straight lines toward something I can point at and name. Every now and then, I’ll pause in the hallway, press my ear to the wall, and wonder what it sounds like on the other side.

But then I’ll turn back to my desk. There’s a doorway here, and I know how to stand in it.