Poetic Matter
Grow with Mother Crow: March 2023
Happy Spring, Mother Crow Subscribers!
Here are your Grow with Mother Crow Creative Writing and Expression Exercises from March 2023.
New exercises are added regularly to MotherCrowPoetry.com
You can access the entire archive here, or submit your own work to be read by Mother Crow here.
Would you like to go straight to the writing prompts? Scroll down and look for the words:
“Try it out: Write about…”
Whether you follow these prompts note-for-note, utilize them merely as creative inspiration, or only consider your responses to them inside your own head, I hope expressing yourself encourages a better understanding of yourself.
I cannot guarantee therapeutic results- nor a cure for your grief and anxiety- but I can promise introspection and self-discovery, and that’s the closest thing I’ve found to mental health.
Let’s Crow!
~Sophia Elizabeth
“They call me…”- March 20, 2023:
Crazy Can Be
Crazy can be wildly expressive.
Crazy can be too calm.
Crazy can be solitude.
Crazy can be all wrong.
Crazy can be panic.
Crazy can want to die.
Crazy can be gaslit.
Crazy can't sleep tonight.
Crazy can be hidden.
Crazy can be mentally ill.
Crazy can be F.I.N.E.
Crazy can be eccentricity
fulfilled.
~
Crazy and I have spent a lot of time together; we grew up together. We've hid in trees together. We've screamed together. We've made blood pacts to do it alone together.
You might know Crazy by its other names- dramatic, shrill, hysterical, moody, unwell. Or, you might know Crazy by its extremes- too loud, too shy, too emotional, too weird, too soon.
I know Crazy like my picked skin, subconsciously scanning myself for imperfections.
I know Crazy like a functioning cog.
I am
Fucked up,
Insecure,
Neurotic, and
Emotional,
but I'm also just fine, so don't worry about it.
I know Crazy intimately.
I hate Crazy like I would an abuser, but I love Crazy too because life would be so boring without its bright colors and dark rooms.
I know Crazy in response to Crazy.
It'd be crazy for me not to be.
~Sophia Elizabeth
12 years later ~ a mother ~ crazy grateful and happy
for everything
Crazy can be. Try it out: Write about how others may negatively perceive you, and then justify it from your point of view with poetic authority.
Start with the words, "They call me ______________," and then fill in whatever comes next without following any rules. It can be an adjective, a noun, a name, a metaphor, a descriptive list... you choose. Ironically, it is not for others to decide what they call you in this poem.
Experiment with commanding and confident language to produce an authoritative tone, and play with repetition, both visually on paper and audibly with your cadence, to drill your message in.
Make meaningful stylistic choices and experiment with diction, grammar, and syntax to manipulate semantics, such as with utilizing capitalization (or a lack thereof) to denote deeper meaning behind a particular word.
For instance, in the poem "crazy," I intentionally wrote the "i" in the line- and i got fucked up in it- in lower case because the version of me I'm referring to is small, child-like, and lacks self-worth while that self-worth is actively being reclaimed by the poem itself with a title not worth capitalizing nor giving it its own line.
“Poetic Matter”- March 29, 2023:
On July 4th, 2012, scientists observed the Higgs Boson particle for the first time using The Large Hadron Collider. The Higgs Boson is a giver of mass nicknamed the God particle. Proving its existence was a spectacular and revolutionary milestone in quantum physics and experimentation. "A Carnival in Higgs Field" is my over-the-Big-Top hyperbole inspired by this discovery. The poem depicts the extent of human curiosity in a dramatic display of awe and gore. Would you pay an arm and a leg to learn how life began?
Listen to “A Carnival in Higgs Field”
As a child, I sought safety in following rules and maintaining order, and at 16 years old, I was a straight-As student in subjects such as calculus, statistics, and chemistry. Late one evening, I was driving home from a friend's house when I mindlessly nudged my purse off the seat. My inexperienced hands followed my eyes off the road and when I looked up, I saw a fence instead of asphalt. My knee-jerk reaction caused my Dodge Ram to violently fishtail through a telephone pole and into a field. The air bag did not employ, so I hit my head on the steering wheel instead, and my body locked up as shock waves surged through my legs and back. Emergency services were called because telephone wires were sparking on the road. It took some time for someone to realize there was a confused and cold, teenage girl panicking in a truck, in the field, as well. I remember the shame spreading over me like mist as my irreversible mistake settled deep into my gut. Fear of everyone finding out caused me to hyperventilate, and I remember shaking uncontrollably as I was carried out of the field on a stretcher. One cop was certain I had been drinking and was visibly upset to learn I hadn't been. He didn't understand how I could end up in that field without alcohol in my system. I had, however, smoked pot earlier that night. I had also just started taking a new "experimental" medication for Bipolar Disorder called Abilify, so despite the policeman's lack of compassion, he wasn't wrong. My eyes did suggest some form of intoxication. He also gave me a ticket for driving past midnight despite not being able to make curfew due to crashing into a pole instead (This is beside the point...) As I was exiting the ambulance, a fireman approached me with a look of confusion. He glanced back at the mangled truck and broken telephone pole, returned his gaze to my unscathed body and said, "You should be dead." Miraculously, all I had was a mild concussion and a cut on the back of my head from where my hairclip broke. When I returned to school a week later, though, I received a "C" grade in AP Calculus. My teacher looked at me as though he were handing the test back to a stranger! I don't know if I couldn't do math anymore or if I just didn't care to, but after my accident, I became a drama student. I shaved my head in protest of gender norms, and I started writing poetry. Math and science developed into dialects of cosmic energy, and the lens I viewed the world with fogged over with feeling. I began to notice how all the matter of the universe was emotionally charged with story, sensation, and rhyme. I am still as analytical as ever, but I think when I hit my head on that steering wheel, the scientist in me took a back seat, and my near death experience convinced the artist to take center stage. Or, perhaps, like the particles in a hadron collider, I needed to crash into something for life to really matter.
Try it out: Write about something scientific and matter-of-fact with intense imagination and extreme exaggeration.
Start with a subject you are particularly curious about:
Plants, photosynthesis, Botany?
Animals, the food chain, Zoology?
Bones, origins, Archeology?
Medicine, diseases, Radiology?
Stars, galaxies, Astronomy?
Cells, synapse, Biology?
Choose language that bridges the gap between the objects of our world and the subjects of our minds, such as with describing the emotions of texture or the memories of taste.
The goal is to morph physical matter into figurative substance through storytelling, imagery, metaphor, and meaning.
EXPERIMENT! Push your creative limits and write in a way you never have before. Like a curious scientist, you may discover something new in the process.
Write your way to inner peace and poetry, and Grow with Mother Crow!
Whether you follow these prompts note-for-note, utilize them merely as creative inspiration, or only consider your responses to them inside your own head, I hope expressing yourself encourages a better understanding of yourself. I cannot guarantee therapeutic results- nor a cure for your grief and anxiety- but I can promise introspection and self-discovery, and that’s the closest thing I’ve found to mental health.
For more creative writing prompts and expression exercises:
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