Telling it Slant: Deconstruction through Poetry

Kicking off our summer deconstruction series with poet/author Jessica Kantrowitz

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. I am so excited to kick off our summer series on deconstruction with this gorgeous essay by my friend and co-worker Jessica Kantrowitz! Jessica has always been a breath of fresh air on the internet, and the way she explains her poetry below helps me be able to sink into the possibilities, complexities, and power of honest and careful attention. I am so glad I know her (and if you are ever looking for a copy editor or social media person, I highly recommend her work!)

Before we get to her piece, I wanted to remind everyone that one week from today I will be hosting my first anti-fascist witchy creative online gathering next Wednesday June 11th at 6PM PT. This will be for paid subscribers only. The first gathering will be very chill and I encourage people to come with an expectation to spend some time thinking about creativity and setting some intentions for the next moon cycle. Bring a tarot deck with you, an oracle deck, a journal, some art supplies . . . and be prepared to have a bit of fun body-doubling with other neurodivergent creatives! I will be sending out a bit more info and the zoom link next Wednesday morning to all the paid subscribers, so if you want to be a part of this gathering (and help me be able to pay creatives like Jessica for her work) please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. Thank you so much!

image by Jessica Kantrowitz

Telling it Slant: Deconstruction through Poetry

by Jessica Kantrowitz

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Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

~Emily Dickinson

In April, 2015, I had an essay go viral. I was a blogger back then, as were many writers, mostly writing random thoughts, little snippets of stories, and the occasional poem. I was also just getting out of a series of bad experiences within the white evangelical world, and trying to figure out the trajectory of my faith. I knew I needed a break, and I knew I needed to heal. But I didn’t know if I was healing to return, or healing to leave.

But one day I touched on a Big Issue on my little blog, at a time when the debate was raging about whether Christian bakers should be required to bake cakes for gay weddings, and my autistic brain saw an analogy in scripture. Bake for them Two, an essay about why I believed Christians *should* bake cakes for queer weddings, went unexpectedly viral. Very viral. All of a sudden I was staring down 1600 comments in my queue, half approving, half telling me exactly why I was wrong. Needless to say it was exhausting.

Over the next few years my following on Twitter grew, and with it the constant comments, replies, arguments, “holding me accountable” DMs, and some that actually made good points. I spent more time than most people, I think, considering other’s thoughts and responding as kindly as I could (though I also could get snarky at times – once every other month, as I joked to my friends). Meanwhile I was watching other writers, particularly those who were doing some form of deconstructing, deal with this constant barrage, and seeing how it wore them out. At a writing conference, Rachel Held Evans showed us how to make some of the worst comments into origami, a creative reclamation I greatly appreciated.

But it was all too much for me. I am not the kind of person who thrives on arguments and constant discussion. I am autistic, for one, though I didn’t realize it at the time, and easily overwhelmed by social interaction (and noises and lights and…pretty much everything). I feel everything deeply, and it was not until my late thirties that I learned to compartmentalize even a little bit. And I figure things out, not by talking about them for the most part, but by observing and thinking, slowly and deeply, and quietly coming to new thoughts and opinions. I was not built to deconstruct publicly.

I’m also not a very verbose writer — even my prose pieces tend to be short. So in the fall of 2019, when I began writing little peace poems into Twitter, part of the appeal to me was the limitation of the 280 characters. I wrote brief benedictions every night, like this:

Peace to the things you left undone
the book abandoned, scarf half-knit

The call you meant to make
the friendship never rekindled

The time you did your hair
and then stayed home

Peace to things
that made no difference
in the end

and those
that may have

Peace to the never knowing

(from my book 365 Days of Peace)

And I started to notice something about the poems. Unlike my essays or prose posts expressing thoughts or opinions, no one argued with these. Something about the form of poetry not only touched people who liked it, but also made people who didn’t like it just keep scrolling. I had come up with a great comeback, too — “Dude, you’re arguing with a poem” — but I never got a chance to use it.

you can’t argue with a poem

you can’t argue with a poem

it won’t listen to your
logic or doctrine

a poem is a wormhole
into another world

for which the poet pays
in blood, in years of her life

you may as well argue
with the vacuum nature abhors

as you’re swept out of the airlock
tumbling into the stars

(from my book Open Things)

So I stopped writing prose almost entirely. And I found I could say a lot more through poetry, without having to fight about it, than I ever could before. Instead of saying, “I don’t believe in this particular Christian doctrine anymore, or this one, or actually that we can be saved or damned at all based on what we believe,” I wrote:

the bread and the wine

you will never have to sign
a statement of faith
to sit at my table

faith is the bread here
but doubt is the wine

and my friends and I rarely
leave each other
entirely
sober

(from Open Things)

Nobody gasped in shock. Nobody wrote an article, as they had when Bake for them Two came out, about how I was a heretic. I was on to something here. And there was lots more to say, lots more to deconstruct about white evangelical Christianity, diet culture and fat phobia, the benevolent patriarchy (to use Bell Hooks’ words) and misogyny, etc.

Instead of writing, “Women have an inherent intuition and inner knowledge and it’s harmful for a culture or religion to teach them to disregard that,” I wrote:

Wide

She was always bigger than
your closed-in spaces.

Eyes open wide to take everything in
before her mouth could tell the truth
before you could tell her what she saw
with her own eyes
was untrue.

She always expanded out past
the rules she was supposed to follow—
larger than politeness
grander than crassness.

She was real enough at birth
to have her own gravity
even when everything around her
floated back and forth
in and out of focus.

She was given things to orbit
but she herself could have been
the center, the sun
all along.

Even when she was small
she was wide.

(unpublished)

Instead of writing, “Diet culture is toxic and we have all been damaged by fat phobia,” I wrote:

Peace to us who flinch
when we look in the mirror
whose eyes are trained
to see our flesh as flawed

Peace to our body
our own dear friend
always soft, always welcoming
our minds to indwell

Anytime to sink
Into depth of belly, skin, and hair
the peace of our own warm
animal self

(from 365 Days of Peace)

And on and on, hundreds of poems that seemed to reach the folks that needed to hear them, yet somehow slide right by the ones who weren’t ready for them, the arguers, and the trolls. Without mentioning the word “deconstructing” I was writing about it almost every day. Maybe this is what Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote — in a poem — “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Maybe not just poetry, but all forms of art have that magic to tell truth slant. Maybe it’s not just hyperbole that the resistance needs artists as much as it needs activists.

I’d like to hope so. And I’d like to think that each of us has that ability — not to write poetry necessarily, or paint, or sing, but to somehow speak our truths in creative ways that bypass rules and doctrine, slip through the fences and past the guards, and reach the ones who understand, the ones who were just waiting to know that they are not alone.

Wings

There is a fence
to keep us in
and a fence
to keep us out
and there are gatekeepers
and those who debate
the requirements
for entry or exit

But you and I, my friend
we are birds
we have wings.

(from Open Things)

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Jessica Kantrowitz is the author of five books, and a social media manager specializing in serving authors and other creatives. You can find out more on her Substack and website.

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Isn’t Jessica the best??? I’m curious to know how people relate to poetry / creative expressions (especially if you are someone who does get pulled into binary thinking sometimes). Let me know in the comments, and thanks again Jessica for this beautiful piece and your decades of thoughtful witness to the world.