This Poet Compiled The Collection She Needed as a Teen Girl

Diana Whitney knows firsthand how poetry can help a young person heal. In the 1980s, Whitney first turned to poetry to process her feelings about her first romantic relationship as a young teen.

“For me, it was an outlet,” Whitney told the FBomb. “Even if I didn’t show it to anybody, I had it in my journals, and it was a way to connect with emotional truth.”

That’s why when Whitney began planning what would become the new poetry anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, she knew she wanted to compile a collection that contained the voices she needed to hear as a teen. The anthology, which is being released on March 30 by Workman Publishing, is divided into chapters that center on themes that include “Seeking,” “Attitude,” “Longing” and “Shame.” It also includes pieces by poetry legends Maya Angelou and Sharon Olds alongside newer, emerging voices like Kayleb Rae Candrilli and Amanda Gorman.

The FBomb had the chance to talk to Whitney about what it was like editing her new anthology, the power of poetry, and her message for teens navigating the pressures of adolescence today.

In your introduction, you write that you wanted to create the book you wish you had as a teen. Can you tell us more about how this collection came to be?

I always say that I’ve been working on this book for two years, but really, I’ve been working on it since I was 13. I really struggled as a teen girl with my mental health, and I struggled with depression, really kind of privately. I also struggled with my identity in high school. I was in the closet as a queer person then — and that wasn’t even in the language in the ’80s — but I’m bisexual. I wrote about it in the introduction, but in a way, my teen years were defined by the fact that I was burying this secret about a part of myself. That secret was that I was having this very profound relationship with another girl, but I was never able to speak of it.

So when I envisioned this book, I was thinking about those kinds of secrets and the pain that teenagers carry. Poetry has always offered me solace, but when I was a teenager, I didn’t have access to the kinds of voices — the queer voices, the empowered women poet’s voices — that I chose for the book. I don’t want to diss my English teachers, because they were wonderful, but aside from maybe Emily Dickinson, there wasn’t much diversity that I remember. Later on, I read Sylvia Plath, and that kind of cropped me open. But I hadn’t read the amazing Black women poets who have come to be really important to me now—names like Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton. I didn’t read those in high school; I actually didn’t find them until later in college.

One of the really interesting things about this collection is that on one page, you’ll have a luminary like Lucille Clifton, and on the other, you’ll discover a piece by a poet who is just making their debut.

What I wanted to do with this book from the beginning was really have a democratic vision of poetry. Poetry is more popular than it’s ever been, and there are these Instagram poets who have been finding an audience without having to go through the usual gatekeepers — the publishing industry and elite literary institutions. I’m really excited about what is happening now with poetry and the internet.

So from the beginning, I wanted to include spoken word poets and Instagram poets who have huge followings. So there was always this idea that we’d have these emerging voices alongside the great literary luminaries like Lucille Clifton and Maya Angelou.

This collection is also notable because it includes a new poem from Amanda Gorman, the Youth Poet Laureate many of us learned about for the first time at President Biden’s inauguration. Can you tell us a little about that poem?

I am so excited about that poem. I’ve actually been following Amanda’s career for a couple years, but I know that for some people, they just discovered her in January. But she is just an extraordinary poet and activist and has just graduated from college. So I’ve been watching her work and waiting for her first book, and when I knew I was doing the project, I reached out to her.

They sent me, I think, five poems to choose from, and I chose this one which I just love, titled “Black Daughter’s Pointillism,” It’s a shape poem, which means that the lines create the shape of a girl. The poem appears in the attitude chapter of the book, which is one of my favorite chapters, because I will say that teen girls definitely have an attitude, but that can be like a very positive thing. It’s about confidence and being grounded, and standing in your truth. Amanda begins the poem with the line “I’m a piece of Work,” so it’s a little cheeky. Then, by the end, we get to an image of a girl hard at work.

For those who have followed Amanda’s career, she’s incredibly hard working. One of the questions I was thinking about was ‘When we think of poetry, what kinds of stories are we telling and what kinds of stories are we listening to?” That’s why having a huge range of diverse voices in this book was so important to me.

What would you like teen readers to take away from this book?

I would hope that a reader encountering the book would browse through it and not feel like they need to read it from start to finish the way you would with a novel. What I love about poetry is you can skip around, and it’s still meaningful because something may jump out at you. So my hope is that a reader might, depending on their mood, think, ‘Oh, yeah, I need to look at the rage chapter today.’ Or they might think, ‘I’m really sad, I’m going to look at the chapter on loneliness.’

So if a teen girl found the book, and even if just one poem, or even a line from a poem, really stuck with her and made her feel less alone and made her feel it was OK to be imperfect and complicated — that’s really where my hope is.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.