As an artist, Casadee Goodwin is first and foremost a poet. She has been writing poetry since middle school, using the medium as a means for processing emotions. “With my art, I express what it feels like to live with mental health challenges. I try to show the raw, honest side of those experiences so people feel less alone in their own struggles,” she states. Hoping to primarily relate to the teenage experience, which is often painful and confusing, Casadee wants to raise confidence in her peers. Through narrating her own personal hardships with poetry, she believes in comforting an audience that is experiencing similar circumstances. By extension, she finds comfort knowing that others will understand the truth of her words. “It makes me feel good to know that some people would want to read my work and feel what I’m writing,” she states.
To Casadee, an important aspect of poetry is that it is an art meant to be vocalized; at the Wayne Theater in Waynesboro, Virginia, she once performed a poem she wrote in eighth grade. She attended an event sponsored by the United State’s National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Out Loud (https://poetryoutloud.org/), which gives high schoolers an opportunity to recite their poetry. Casadee rehearsed her poem “tip off”, which is the piece shared for this feature. While reciting this poem, Casadee and a close friend of hers took turns between lines (seen below, each line break represents shifts in the speaker). Switching between narrators per phrase enhanced the tension of the poem. For the poem’s final six lines, Casadee and her friend would recite the ending simultaneously (each line break for this section represents a pause). The performance overall produced an additional expressive element, intensifying the themes of internal strife within the poem itself. Casadee values that poetry is not just a written art, but a spoken art with immense possibilities.
Below is a poem written by Casadee Goodwin:
tip off
i feel my grip loosening
i hear the crowd screaming
my coach yelling out a play
i feel the sweat drip down my face like rain drop
time out im thirsty,
the clocks goes tic then tok.
i feel like i’m stuck
like my feet is glued to the court like i can’t move,
i hear people trying to talk to me it seems like i’m under water like i can't hear them clearly.
i hear my dad over every one else yelling at me to get my head in the game.
my coach does the same but it’s just not the same.
i feel like a flame as my team looks at me like i’m the one to blame
i feel ashamed.
i feel the ground underneath me open up and eat me alive
i felt as if i couldn’t breathe like how you feel when you’re in so deep.
my heartbeat goes quiet as the clock ticks and beeps the quarter is over.
i feel my eyes water as i look up at the board and see that my time is finally over.
i feel this overwhelming pain take over.
the final score was
21-20
im trying to laugh
make it funny
but really
the tiniest things
can make it seem
like i failed my team
Sckolher Berry