HOW TO KILL YOUR LOVELY CLICHES AND REPLACE THEM WITH FRESH METAPHOR & SIMILE

Cliché can be the death of a poem; and I feel this applies doubly to love poetry. Given it is almost Valentine’s Day, it might be good to recap a handful of common love clichés and how they can be avoided. And poets SHOULD WORK HARD to avoid them whenever possible. First, it is important to understand what a cliché is:

Stephen Minot defines a cliché as: “A metaphor or simile that has become so familiar from overuse that it no longer contributes any meaning whatever to the poem. It provides neither the vividness of a fresh metaphor nor the strength of a single unmodified word.” In other words, it is old hat and humdrum writing.

As I have said before, poems full of clichés are like plates of stale and cold food: totally unappetizing and they turn the reader off. They are stodgy donuts that sit heavy in the reader’s stomach.

Examples of tired, nauseating, and done-to-death love clichés include:

~ eyes like limpid pools
~ broken hearts
~ the bottom of the soul
~ setting a soul or heart on fire
~ the bitter blow of love
~ loving until the end of time
~ I love you more than . . . [insert trite word or phrase]
~ lost in each other’s eyes
~ love’s embrace
~ my heart aches for you
~ my heart is an open book
~ hearts drowning in sorrow
~ hearts and souls laid bare
~ my tears feel like rain
~ one true love
~ souls and hearts full of longing
~ my heart withered like . . . [insert another cliché here]
~ the first blush of love
~ the rose in her cheeks
~ love as deep as the ocean
~ lips as red as wine
~ skin like marble and alabaster

I could go on, but I expect you get the idea. Clichés like these should, if you pardon the pun, be avoided like the plague! They are bumper-sticker sentiments that belong on cheap Hallmark greeting cards, not in excellent poetry.

Your task as a poet is always to find a new way to express these tired feelings. Readers value creative talent and they want to see poems that rise above the mundane. People read poetry to experience something beyond the ordinary. Cliché dulls meaning and the reading experience overall.

So how does one take a cliché and turn it into something fresh and new? It is a 3-step process:

1. Determine what the clichéd phrase is saying.

Let us take the last cliché in this list as a working example: “Her skin was as smooth and white as marble.” Fairly obviously the poet is describing the unblemished nature, and colour, of his lover’s skin. It is likely this cliché has arisen over the years because marble is commonly used in sculpting the human form. And the cliché itself has become tired and wan.

2. Think of an original way to SHOW what the cliché is describing.

For this cliché, start by thinking about things that are white, and likely to be smooth. You may come up with things such as alabaster, milk, cream, porcelain, china, linen, mist. From this list, you select the thing that is not as often associated with describing skin or human limbs. In this case, linen and mist are the most appropriate as the other words have also clichéd over time in respect of representing skin. For this exercise I chose to use mist.

3. Create a new metaphor or simile using the new imagery.

I took my object associated with whiteness and smoothness (mist) and turned it into a phrase:
“Her skin was like the morning mist in autumn.”

Now look at old and new together:

OLD: “Her skin was as smooth and white as marble.”
NEW: “Her skin was like the morning mist in autumn.”

The new simile communicates the idea of whiteness much better than the worn-out, old, and familiar cliché of marble. It allows dreaming room for the reader to picture the pearly white colour of a morning mist (as colour is not stated) and visualize this as representing flawlessly smooth skin (because the word smooth is avoided). It also hints at the coolness that would be found in marble.

And you can also see that the poet had made the reader do a little work as well; they have to IMAGINE as they have not been told exactly what to see in terms of colour and material/form.

Now go out and attack your Valentine clichés! Hunt them down in your poems! Corral them and then reinvent them one by one into new similes and metaphors that will excite your readers.

© Samantha Beardon