Trailing clouds of glitter from a surprise Broadway triumph in Kenneth Lonergan’s serio-comedy This Is Our Youth, Rookie magazine founder Tavi Gevinson has expanded her extensive resume to include publishing maven. In addition to compiling the fourth Rookie Yearbook, due out this fall, Gevinson just made her debut as a literary editor. In the July/August issue of Poetry, the 103-year-old magazine that introduced American readers to the likes of Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gevinson curated and edited more than 50 pages of poems, prose and art, including a self-deprecating, funny, charming essay she wrote about her own evolution as a writer and a reader. She celebrates the kind of sincerity adults are taught to reject; her selections are optimistic, unironic, and downright joyful.
Gevinson and I talked on the phone about poetry, feelings, moving to New York, and her ever-evolving personal aesthetic—she is, after all, still 19.
Eugenia Williamson: In the essay you wrote in Poetry, you talk about the embarrassment you felt about liking Sylvia Plath when you were a young teenager and other ways poetry conjures embarrassment. Tell me more!
Tavi Gevinson: I wouldn’t be comfortable writing poetry myself. I wrote about the shame or stigma I felt around it, and [I wasn’t talking about] the challenge of great poets that you study in English class. Where I went to school, there was a spoken word program, and it was a requirement every year. The teacher who ran the program would come in to your class and run a week-long workshop. I was just too embarrassed to share this stuff with my classmates. I didn’t want to expose [myself] trying to be deep or any of that. I just blew it off a lot of the time. The one time I really tried, I couldn’t get through it without laughing at myself.
Now I feel like it’s really silly to be afraid of those things, and I should have embraced something I’m good at, which is speaking candidly about how I feel. It’s kind of funny—that’s something that maybe you naturally have as a kid or is somewhat innate to childhood, the way kids are brutally honest. Somewhere along the line, you’re like, “Oh wait, life is a competition,” and everything is a reality show; everything is an episode of “The Apprentice.” You learn about parts of the world where the currency is how much you can withhold. But eventually, you learn that if you actually communicate with people then you’ll have happier relationships. [With this essay], I wanted to figure out why we’re so scared of feelings.
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