12 Poetry Cliches to Avoid (a Contest Judge's List)
A contest judge keeps a tally sheet of the images and phrases that appear in every judging round. Here are the twelve most common, why they cost points, and what to write instead.
I keep a tally sheet beside me when I judge. One December round, out of roughly ninety entries, I counted fourteen shattered mirrors, eleven hearts described as broken glass, and nine souls dancing in the rain. None of those poems placed. Not because a rule forbids rain, but because a judge who has met the same image fourteen times in one evening stops feeling anything when it arrives, and contests are scored on feeling. So consider this the insider's list of poetry cliches to avoid: the twelve I see every single month, plus the more interesting move each one is covering for.
One promise before the list. I am not going to tell you to avoid writing about love, death, or the moon. Subjects are never the problem. The problem is reaching for the nearest pre-owned phrase when the subject gets difficult.
Why Cliches Cost Double in a Contest
In an open mic, a cliche costs you a little audience warmth. In a contest, it costs you twice, and it helps to understand the mechanics.
First, the direct hit: most rubrics score language and creativity separately, and a borrowed image drags both at once. On Writory's five-criteria breakdown, for example, I have watched a single "time heals all wounds" ending pull an otherwise strong entry down in language and creativity simultaneously, two dents from one phrase.
Second, the trust tax. A cliche in stanza one tells the judge how you behave under pressure, and the judge starts anticipating your choices. Once a reader can predict you, even your good lines get read as luck. That is the real damage: not the phrase itself, but the downgraded attention everything after it receives.
A cliche is a poem's way of telling you exactly where you stopped paying attention. Read your draft looking for the borrowed parts, and you will find the places you flinched.
Poetry Cliches to Avoid: Numbers 1 Through 6, the Images
The first six are images so worn they have stopped being pictures. For each, I have named the honest observation the cliche is standing in front of.
- Shattered mirrors and broken glass hearts. Covering for: the specific way your particular loss distorted how you see yourself. Show me the actual mirror, the one in the hallway with the sticker your daughter left on it.
- Dancing in the rain. Covering for: joy that ignores consequence. Real defiant joy has a cost attached; name the soaked shoes, the phone ruined in a pocket, the neighbor watching.
- Caged birds and broken wings. Covering for: a constraint you have not examined closely enough to describe. What actually confines you has a landlord, a diagnosis, or a surname.
- Tears like rain, or rain as sadness. Covering for: weather doing your feeling for you. Let the weather be weather; let the person cry badly, at the wrong moment, in front of the wrong people.
- The candle in the darkness. Covering for: hope you have not tested. Hope with no specifics is decor. Hope that survives a named difficulty is a poem.
- Ocean waves of emotion. Covering for: intensity you could not measure. Emotion in winning poems has a size and a location: it fits in a kitchen, a wristband, a voicemail.
Numbers 7 Through 12: the Moves and Phrases
The second six are not images but habits, and they fool better poets because they hide in structure rather than vocabulary.
- The ending that explains the poem. Three good stanzas, then a final one beginning "And so I learned..." Trust your images; the lesson is the reader's souvenir to take, not yours to hand over gift-wrapped.
- Rhyming heart with apart (and soul with whole). The rhyme pairs every judge can complete before the line ends. If your form needs rhyme, work the less obvious pairings; the entry on the sonnet shows how much room a strict form still leaves.
- The pointless line-break flourish. Breaking mid-phrase for drama when nothing turns at the break. This one fools genuinely good poets, because it wears the costume of craft. A break should change or charge the meaning, which is the whole art of enjambment, not just decorate the margin.
- Addressing an abstract You who is really Everyone. "You never know what you have until..." A poem aimed at everyone lands on no one. Pick a single person and let the rest of us eavesdrop.
- The dictionary-definition opener. "Grief (noun): the response to loss." It felt fresh in one famous poem decades ago; it now arrives several times per round, always with the same knowing tone.
- Darkness and light as a complete moral system. Dark equals bad, light equals good, journey from one to the other equals poem. Dickinson knew better a century and a half ago: "There's a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons, / That oppresses." Light, oppressing. That reversal is why the lines still work.
A note on the borderline cases, because poets always ask. The moon is not on this list. Neither are seasons, rivers, mothers, or mirrors themselves. Those are subjects, and subjects cannot be worn out, only handled lazily. The test is never "has this been written about before," because everything has. The test is whether your treatment could be swapped into a stranger's poem without anyone noticing the graft. A moon that "bathes the world in silver light" fails that test instantly. A moon your father checked through binoculars every Sunday of his last autumn passes it, and would pass it in ten thousand more poems, because the binoculars are yours.
The Repair Job: One Stanza, Before and After
Here is a stanza I wrote deliberately in tally-sheet style, the kind I meet every month:
My heart was shattered glass that night,
tears falling down like rain,
a caged bird searching for the light
to fly beyond the pain.
Four lines, four entries from the list, zero information about an actual life. Now the repair, done the only way that works: replacing each borrowed part with something owned.
That night I ate her funeral sweets alone
and washed the steel plate twice.
The parrot she taught to say my name
said it at 2 a.m., to no one.
Notice what happened. Grief got an address, an object, a time stamp, and a witness. The parrot is doing everything the caged bird pretended to do, and it hurts more because it is particular. This is the whole method for every item on the list: the cliche names the feeling, the repair stages the evidence.
The 15-Minute Cliche Sweep
Before your next submission, run this drill on the finished draft:
- Underline test. Underline every image. For each, ask: could this appear unchanged in a stranger's poem? Every yes gets rewritten with a detail only you know.
- Prediction test. Read each line to a friend and stop before the last word. Every word they guess correctly is a word doing no work.
- First-thought test. For your poem's central image, list the first three images the theme suggests, then ban all three. Your fourth thought is usually where your actual poem starts. This is worth doing especially with the crowded themes; the love theme page is a useful reminder of just how much company you have.
- Ending test. Cover your final stanza. If the poem is complete without it, your real ending is already on the page and the last stanza is explanation.
Fifteen minutes. I have watched this single drill move poets from the anonymous middle of a round into the placings, because most entries lose on borrowed language, not weak feeling.
Write the Fourteenth Mirror Anyway
Here is the ending you might not expect from the man with the tally sheet: I do not want you to fear cliches. Fear produces careful, bloodless poems, and careful poems lose too, just more politely.
Every cliche on this list was once a discovery. Somebody was the first to notice that grief feels like broken glass, and it must have been electrifying. The phrase died of success, that is all. Your job is not to avoid the territory; it is to walk past the marker where the last poet stopped and keep going into the specific, unphotographed part of your own experience. The list above is not a fence. It is a map of exactly where the fresh ground begins.
So write the mirror poem if the mirror is truly yours. Then sweep it, repair it, and put it in front of a judge who has read fourteen mirrors this month and is quietly begging for the one that shows a real face.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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