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Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and we're back with The Takeaway. All month long here on The Takeaway, we've been hearing the voices of young poets to mark April as National Poetry Month.

Alyssa Gaines: I'm Alyssa Gaines. I'm 18 years old, and I'm the National Youth Poet Laureate finalist from the Midwest.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Alyssa is already a winner. She's representing the Midwest region in a program created and curated by Urban Word. Like Isabella Ramirez, Jessica Kim, and Elizabeth Shvarts, three other poets that we've heard from this month, Alyssa is vying for the top spot as the National Youth Poet Laureate, and she'll find out on May 20th at the Kennedy Center in DC. We asked Alyssa to tell us how she developed her love of poetry.

Alyssa Gaines: My first introduction to poetry was an assignment to write a poem in a class in the 3rd grade, and I chose to write about the color Black, because at the time I was just beginning to think about my identity in the context of the world, the society in which I lived and how instrumental my racial identity was in that, and creating community and traditions and culture through which I could see myself.

I wrote that poem about the color Black, and after that I showed it to my family members and they connected me with a local middle school who was having a poetry club and a poetry slam. Very quickly my introduction to poetry began an introduction to slam and slam poetry, and so I saw my first slam. I loved it. I loved the element of community and urgency that were built into slam poetry in the sense that you have an audience.

To your audience, you owe respect for their time and their attention, and so you have to talk about something important in that community, and that relationship between a performer and their audience. I kept writing, and I kept getting ready for these slams. Then I started participating and competing. I remember very distinctly, one of my most instrumental, fundamental experiences with poetry that began to foster deep love for it and keep me writing was when I got to participate in the slam of the Americas at the Library of Congress.

I was 13 years old at the time. It was an amazing experience. Through that experience, I did a poem about the Black Lives Matter Movement and things that I was starting to become aware of, but more importantly, it was really about me and my relationship to a friend who had a Confederate flag on her back porch. It was me explaining to her my relationship to that symbol.

I talk about these other things that are going on in the world at the time. I got my first perfect score in a slam. It was crazy. The audience stood up, and just seeing that exchange, that transaction between you and your story and the audience, and seeing people connect with it, even when it was something so personal.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Alyssa also told us she uses poetry in every aspect of her life.

Alyssa Gaines: Poetry has been instrumental in the way that it challenges me to think deeper, not only about my own relationship to various topics, but the way I can convey that to other people, the role and the power of language, and the role and the power of history, because in poetry, these are things that are very important. I'll give a quick example that I think applies to every other part of my future.

I've done this huge paper, huge research project on how can we look to the ideological foundations of conservatism, and then trace that philosophical history of conservatism back to a few foundations, and then connect these foundations to what is shared between the culture of Black Americans and working white Americans in rural areas.

At the beginning of my presentation, I started by practicing it, saying, "Usually when I'm up on a stage, I'm doing a poem." Immediately in my mind I thought back again to that moment of me at the Library of Congress doing this poem about my friend's Confederate flag. I really began thinking about this two-year research that I've been doing as a senior or junior in high school. I can trace it back to a poem that I wrote when I was 13.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Here's Alyssa Gaines with her original work, Deferred.

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Alyssa Gaines: The first season felt like fall,

The smell of standing outside on the top row of bleachers at your first football game,

Or little Ugg boots crushing crisp dents in the first snow

And studying inside a Starbucks with all your new friends for first finals.

As something fell softly against the window and seasons began to change,

The last felt like finding dandelion seeds in the bottom of my backpack,

Or four-leaf clover cut under my lacrosse cleats, picking flowers out of the ground to throw in the air

And never see them come back down a last season like remembering.

All the of hope behind every portal and screen,

The same screens you watch like broken clocks in the time,

When the season stopped changing turn to curtains

Fixed a front a window you can't open yet.

All the anticipation brimming like pollen, or pedals that won't quite drop

One for every night you spent alone, in a dark room you knew the seasons would change sometime

For months inside between then and now, I name each spot of rain on the rainiest day of future, that makes my clothes heavy

I know this season that there are many things I am not anymore, that I am changed like what falls to.

There are many things I left behind as time froze around me,

The earth caught in a whirlwind of new, the grass outside, sick and taking time to bring itself back.

I know that I, too, have done this somehow

The world around me feels fresh again and heavier all the same.

I know this season, there are many things my body fought out of me,

Many things I've forgotten in the name of new spring,

Grade point averages under a pile of clothes, that are all packed up and sent away now, or suspended in stale air

My head is so pressed against the window, wishing for something to fall from the sky

I didn't even see them shrivel up.

I know this season how to shed pain

I learned from watching the trees,

From wishing they would remember how to shake free and teach me to bloom again,

Eventually they did.

I have only felt fully one cycle of seasons outside in the past four years

The earth has done something in ways I couldn't see

Now I am expecting as I see another cycle before me,

Watching the transitory period become a loose leaf in time watch.

Everyone remember how to shake off and grow again

And I'm 18, a senior on the edge of spring, forgetting what days of screen light and dark rooms and solitude felt like briefly,

With every pretty sky and sunrise,

But remembering behind the screen, as seasons sit up straight,

Anxious to change again and again, remembering the in-between, alone

As I learned that they've deferred my dream, I wonder if all these moments were worth it.

Lingering on the window, where my letter of deferral sits open, watch the rain send up in the sun and wonder,

For all that I can become, I wait expectedly outside for the next season

Curious when the earth so full, so tired, so new, so reborn, and so heavy will explode

I wonder when will I?

Melissa Harris-Perry: My thanks to Alyssa Gaines, and all of our other young poets this month for sharing so much with us. You can find our stories featuring these young bards at thetakeaway.org.

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