“Pethetic Little Thing”

Tavi Gevinson is a guest editor for the July/August issue of Poetry Magazine, and the poems assembled are very, very good. The following is an excerpt from her editor’s letter:

What you have here are poems, artwork, and essays, most by self-proclaimed angsty teens, and some by adults who were once angsty teens and still kind of feel like angsty teens. I wanted to hash out the fear so many of us have of writing and reading poetry, which is really a fear of seeming like an angsty teen. I wanted emotion and watercolor and tiny handwriting, void of any self-aware cringing or patronizing pity-smiling, but not commendable only by virtue of its sincerity.

Understanding poetry seems to be the biggest obstacle to enjoying poetry; or maybe it’s the obstacle to feeling worthy of it? I think Tavi’s right that the fear of being seen as an “angsty teen” prevents us from expressing enthusiasm or affection for art, like the goal of connecting to art is to transfer or project our feelings onto some safe, third-party, emotionally neutral space.

The piece that I’ve spent the most time with so far is by Hairpin contributor Jenny Zhang and is called “How It Feels.” This is the section I wanted to share with you and literally everyone I know:

When someone dies, we go searching for poetry. When a new chapter of life starts or ends — graduations, weddings, inaugurations, funerals — we insist on poetry. The occasion for poetry is always a grand one, leaving us little people with our little lives bereft of elegies and love poems.

But I want elegies while I’m still alive, I want rhapsodies though I’ve never seen Mount Olympus. I want ballads, I want ugly, grating sounds, I want repetition, I want white space, I want juxtaposition and metaphor and meditation and ALL CAPS and erasure and blank verse and sonnets and even center-aligned italicized poems that rhyme, and most of all — feelings.

Read all the poems here.