Cliches

[RiverNotch]

To try and "systematize" discerning whether a cliché is well-employed or not, I suppose the two things an artist should be when employing a cliché is to be both confident and credible. The artist must either fully commit to the cliché they employ, or else they must fully commit to the irony of their employment -- anything less, and they'll betray their anxiety over their supposed lack of either intelligence or originality, an anxiety which would make the reader question whether the poem is even worth their time. At the same time, the artist must understand the full breadth of meanings and other employments behind the cliché they employ as much as they can, otherwise their employment will end up being awkward or journeyman-like. Shakespeare's use of "born to die" is ironic, I think, as it comes from the mouth of Juliet's father, when Juliet refuses to meet with Paris -- think Polonius's aphorisms, as he parts with Paris -- and, in that sense, it works very well. Looking at the Lana del Rey song, it seems to be your usual postmodern pop single -- it literally starts with "Feet don't fail me now" -- only I'm not sure it really works, as at this point in her career I'm not sure she'd adequately built up her whole "I'm a white girl who loves the 1950s-1970s, but I understand how problematic that era was" schtick yet. Similarly, Ed Sheeran's employment of the somewhat cliché term "shape" in the song "Shape of You" is banal to no end, especially when he tries to dancehall it up in the whitest way possible, whereas Perfume Genius's employment of the term in the song "Slip Away" feels a lot more credible, if one comes to it with an understanding of the artist's Crohn's disease and his experiences with homophobia and domestic abuse. But in all this, I am reminded of my experience reading Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness. One of the main characters, Estraven, speaks frequently in clichés....and yet it works so well, to the point that they sound rather poetic, partly because Estraven clearly understands the clichés he employs, coming to such an understanding naturally, and partly because the novel is also science fiction, with Estraven coming from an entirely fictional world: his proverbs and aphorisms are cliché to him, with the text constantly being explicit about their being so, yet they are entirely new to the reader, being Le Guin's inventions (or translations from other, less well-known cultures -- her parents were renowned anthropologists, and I understand she herself studied other languages).