Why

[rowens]

A cliche is something overused. Difficult and obscure poetry can be cliche too. If you don't know that something's overused and cliche, then people wonder what else you might not know.

Though if I find it effective to say or write something that's been made cliche, I'll write it anyway. If I find it important to say that a woman's face is blushing as red as a red rose, then I'll say it; but then people might or might not know whether or not I'm aware that I'm not being even close to original with that.

My idea about writing something difficult to understand is that, maybe it's simply a difficult or complex subject; or maybe somebody wants you to travel convoluted paths through your mind and feelings, so both the writer and the reader can do some work together.

[Todd]

Some poems are hard to understand. That's absolutely true. The answer is that they usual lack clarity. The handbasket poem you reference (in my opinion) would have less clarity issues if it replaced the word it with "her heart". Its usually a very simple thing to edit for clarity. Cliches would not have made it better, just been another issue to look at. Every poem has issues to work on.

The reason we push so hard against cliches is because they're a form of shorthand that is so overused and so unoriginal that they rob the language of any freshness or power. Cliches are also usually fairly vague.

He was a pain in my neck
She broke my heart

Yeah you understand what they mean, but there's no power to it. It rests on the surface. You have no idea what level of pain the person caused the other person, or the extent of the heartbreak.

Poetry is about the condensed power of language with original images and phrases. Cliche is a greeting card. Poetry is meant to be more than that.

I didn't take your comments as a blast. Its worth discussing.

If most get left behind in understanding a poem that usually points to other problems.

I think if a poem is obscure for the sake of obscurity it fails. However, if its complex and interesting and you can unlock its meaning once you see it (whether that's through a reference, or a literary allusion, or whatever) then its like one of those magic photographs of dots when you look at the picture the correct way and the image forms. That's when it gets sort of cool. That said some of the poems I like are very easy to understand but again are not cliched. Here are two for reference (quite different):

Their Sex Life

One failure on
Top of another

by A. R. Ammons

What the Dog Perhaps Hears

If an inaudible whistle
blown between our lips
can send him home to us,
then silence is perhaps
the sound of spiders breathing
and roots mining the earth;
it may be asparagus heaving,
headfirst, into the light
and the long brown sound
of cracked cups, when it happens.
We would like to ask the dog
if there is a continuous whir
because the child in the house
keeps growing, if the snake
really stretches full length
without a click and the sun
breaks through clouds without
a decibel of effort,
whether in autumn, when the trees
dry up their wells, there isn't a shudder
too high for us to hear.
What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?
For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed.

by
Lisel Mueller


Cliches don't make it clear. They make it boring. That's mostly why we rail against them.

Best,

Todd

[Leanne]

A lot of new writers will overuse cliches. That doesn't make them bad writers. It does mean, however, that they're really using someone else's words and taking a shortcut by giving the reader the already familiar, rather than creating a fresh and interesting image that is unique to that poem. A cliche can fit any poem. As Todd said, they're often vague and don't really add anything.

It's been said (so many times that it's a massive cliche!) that there are no new things to write about. Everyone's felt pain, heartache, loss, love, happiness, etc. So what's left to the poet is to write about these old things in new ways. If you use cliches, people are going to read your poem once and then forget it because it gave them nothing new, nothing to make them think. Sure, people know what you're talking about -- but they know because they could easily have said it themselves. It's like the difference between a colour-by-numbers picture and an original painting.

Fresh phrases have power. The challenge rests in coming up with something that still holds meaning, is not deliberately obscure or too great a stretch for the reader and brings a new angle to the subject.

At the end of the day, we're not delivering a lecture or talking to our friends in the playground at lunch -- we're writing poetry that hopefully people will want to read more than once.

---

PS We're not just stuck on hating cliches -- we also hate forced rhyme, bad meter, overuse of alliteration and all sorts of other things

[popeye]

I'll try and be succinct and answer that with a cliche.... Be Yourself!

[brandontoh]

As Todd said, cliches don't make a poem easier to understand, they make a poem boring. What's more, it is entirely possible for people to employ cliches and still lack clarity. The boring part is the main reason we discourage cliches.