What’s wrong with using clichés in poetry? Well, it’s boring. Who wants to read something they’ve heard a hundred times before?
Good poetry is original. It often surprises readers with new and interesting images or ways of looking at things. Clichés don’t do that.
Clichés can be useful in normal speech as a kind of shorthand. That, in a nutshell, is the problem. Clichés don’t require any thought from the writer, and they don’t evoke thought or emotion in the reader. (Note that “in a nutshell” is itself a cliché. It didn’t require much thought on my part to write that sentence, and I bet you didn’t have to think about it much to understand what I meant. I bet it doesn’t cause you to feel much emotion, either. That’s okay in this type of writing, but it’s not okay in a poem.)
Here are some clichés I commonly see in poems:
I can’t live/breathe without you
The road less traveled
You make the sun shine
The sands of time
Looking into my soul
My head is spinning
My tears fell like rain
Stars like diamonds
Of course, there are variations on these, and there are hundreds more as, well.
If you’ve heard it before, it’s probably a cliché. If you’ve heard it often, it definitely is. One quick and easy way to determine if something is cliché is to go to your favorite search engine (I like Google) and enter the phrase in question. Put the phrase in quotation marks so the search engine will only look for the entire phrase and won’t pick out individual words. Try it with a phrase like “you take my breath away” and see how many results the search engine finds.
Being said before is not the only thing that makes a phrase cliché, though. Clichés are generic instead of specific. Consider the phrase “He’s always there for me.” What exactly is that saying? Who is he? Where is there? And if you need him, wouldn’t you rather he be here instead of there?
In addition to phrases that are cliché, there are also topics which are cliché. How many poems have you read- or written- about a broken heart? That doesn’t mean you can’t ever write poetry about a common subject like that, but if you’re going to write about something so typical, you’d better do it in a very interesting way. You’ll have to think of something new or unusual to say about a broken heart.
Some very common subjects for poetry include:
A broken heart
Finding your One True Love
Depression
The death of a loved one
Fond memories of parents or grandparents
Childhood abuse
Practice
Choose a poem you’ve written in the past that contains one or more clichés. Rewrite the poem, finding more original ways to say what you want to say.
Try writing a poem about a common subject. You can use one of the topics listed above, or you can think of another. See if you can say something that hasn’t been said before, or say it in a way it hasn’t been said before.
