You recently wrote a powerful poem in the wake of the Uvalde shooting. What prompted you to both write and publish that?
Obviously, I wrote that poem a million years after filming the MasterClass, but it does still originate from that same place inside of me that doesn’t just want to write but to do right as well. I don’t want my words to just be pretty flashy things, but words that build momentum on themselves. And like so many people, I was horrified by what happened in Texas, by what happened in Buffalo, by what’s been happening, quite frankly, all over our country, in terms of gun violence against the innocent. At first, I told myself I wasn’t going to write a new poem, mostly because I felt like I couldn’t. This pain of losing so many innocent people to gun violence isn’t new in the United States, of course, and I felt like I was incapable of personally writing anything new about it. But late at night, a day or two after the Texas tragedy, some ideas were formulating in my brain, new and old. And as I began tweeting them out, I saw a huge influx of responses to them, to the point that in a few days, those verses I had posted online had helped raise over a million dollars [for Everytown for Gun Safety]. That was just so incredible to me, and I knew then that I had to keep writing, because that was at least one of the ways in which I could continue to participate in changing our country to where we need to be. And so I wrote “Hymn for the Hurting” in the hope that those words could continue to make people’s pain feel seen and heard, as well as most importantly, acted upon.
Clearly, you enjoyed doing the MasterClass. Is teaching something you see in your future?
Oh, 100%. I love teaching so much, and I think that’s something I missed the most out of many things during the pandemic. There’s nothing quite as magical as being in a classroom of students and seeing them discover poetry or find their own voice for the first time. I just think that’s the most thrilling thing. And doing the MasterClass, I think I was able to get a piece of that back during a time when that wasn’t accessible for everybody. So I definitely see teaching in my future. Also, my mom would be incredibly disappointed and surprised if I said no to that question. [Laughs.] It’s in my veins.
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