(upbeat music) - Shall I tell you then that we exist.

There came a light blue and white careening, the police like wailing angels to bitter me.

Competitive speech is a thing that I do.

There's different events that you can do and one of them is poetry interpretation.

I just find that poetry is my event is hypothetical.

Poetry is a good outlet and sometimes poetry doesn't make sense, but when you think about it more, it makes you understand it better.

Poetry Out Loud is poetry out loud in the competition.

It starts off a school-wide competition and then you go to state and then if you win, you get to go to nationals.

Poems are selected from the Poetry Out Loud website.

You select three poems, you have two that you recite and then if you make it to the top five you then can recite your third poem.

One of them has to be less than 25 lines and the other has to be pre 20th century.

- Great, anyone can visit.

- [Gabrielle] You're being judged on accuracy, the appropriateness of dramatization as well as your body language.

What I do poetry, it's more dramatic that I kind of had to unlearn what I learned to do for competitive speech poetry and really get to like the core of Poetry Out Loud which is really being the poem.

The country I come from is called the Midwest, Bob Dylan.

I want to be doused in cheese and fried.

I want to wander the aisles.

My heart's supermarket stopped high as cholesterol.

I like poems that are literal and just kind of like straightforward.

Most of the poems on that website are poetic and metaphorical with preparing and practicing.

It really taught me to like really read.

It's really like trying to find what the author meant but also trying to find a space and a way to bring my voice into it.

- [Announcer] The North Dakota Poetry Out Loud 2023 State Champion, Gabrielle Johnson.

(audience applauding) - I'm still processing that cause I was really like, I did it what?

Like that's crazy.

Poetry's a great way to get people to think and think about what you want to say and a message you want to bring to other people.

I feel like that's great and that's what I wanna do and that's what I did and I'm gonna keep doing that.

Let me sing the songs for the people.

Songs for the old and young songs that stir like a battle cry wherever they are sung not for the clashing of sabers, for carnage nor for strife, but songs to thrill the hearts of men.

Poetry can be cool, it can be fun.

It's in art form.

It's how people express themselves and how you can inspire and touch other people.

I've never seen Poetry Loud didn't really know much about it and I came last year and I watched, it Inspired me.

There aren't a lot of opportunities for people to just say poetry and so coming here, being around other people who wanna listen to poetry, it creates like a nice environment to really like listen to it.

It reaches other people it makes them think it's just cool vibes and Poetry Out Loud is able to do that with what they do.

Black Matters is by Keith S. Wilson after D.H. Lawrence, when I first read it, I was like is it just talking about black holes or something?

Like what's going on?

But then looking back and analyzing it, I'm like, okay this is really metaphorical.

I like the first line.

"Shall I tell you, then, that we exist?"

And now one really spoke to me because we exist, not your average Midwesterner, different cultures, different races different backgrounds we exist and the struggles that come with that.

So I really wanted to bring that to life and talk about those things.

Black Matters by Keith S. Wilson after D.H. Lawrence, shall I tell you then that we exist.

There came a light blue and white careening the police like wailing angels to bitter me.

And so this dark matter is hypothetical.

Know that it cannot be seen in the gunpowder of a flower and a worm that raisins on the concretes and a man that wills himself not to speak gags.

Oh, gags for a shadow, cannot breathe.

It deprives them of nothing.

Pride is born in the black and then dies in it.

I hear how shadow low trouble the clasping of our hands, dark matter is invisible.

We infer it how light bends around a black body and still you do not see black halos.

Even here, my having told you plainly where they are.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funded by the North Dakota Council on the Arts and by the members of Prairie Public.