Don't Avoid Cliches in Poetry. Subvert Them Instead
Avoiding cliches produces careful, forgettable poems. Subverting them produces winners. Four concrete moves for turning dead phrases into live wires, with worked examples from a judge's desk.
The standard advice is wrong, or at least half wrong, and I want to spend the next fifteen hundred words proving it. Every workshop tells you to avoid cliches. Hunt them, cut them, salt the earth. But the most electric poem I scored last year walked straight up to 'time heals all wounds' and broke its jaw. If you want to subvert cliches, poetry gives you better tools than any other art form, because a cliche is not garbage. It is a loaded gun someone left on the table, and avoidance just means leaving the room. The poets who win contests pick it up and point it somewhere new.
Here is the argument, the four moves, and the worked edits.
What a Cliche Actually Is
Every cliche was once a great line. 'Heart of gold' startled somebody in the 1500s. 'Blind as a bat', 'cold shoulder', 'tip of the iceberg': each began as a live metaphor, so vivid that everyone borrowed it, and everyone borrowing it is exactly what killed it. A cliche is a metaphor that succeeded itself to death.
That history matters for a practical reason. A cliche marks the site of a real, shared human perception. People kept saying 'time heals all wounds' because time visibly does something to grief and we needed words for it. The perception underneath is still alive. Only the wording is embalmed. Which means every cliche in your draft is a signpost reading: genuine feeling buried here, previous excavation abandoned.
A cliche is a truth that has stopped asking to be believed.
Why Pure Avoidance Produces Beige Poems
Now watch what happens when a poet follows the standard advice with full obedience. They delete 'my heart shattered'. Good. But they replace it with nothing, because the feeling itself now seems contaminated, and the poem retreats into safe abstraction: 'I experienced the ending of us.' The cliche was at least pointing at something. The avoidance points at nothing.
I see this constantly on the scoring table. The over-workshopped poem is instantly recognizable: no cliches, no risks, no fingerprints. It commits no crimes and no acts of interest. If I am honest, I would rather read the raw draft with three cliches in it, because at least the cliches show me where the poet actually felt something.
Avoidance treats the cliche as contagious. Subversion treats it as raw material. That single change of attitude separates two entire tiers of contest entries.
How to Subvert Cliches in Poetry: Four Moves
Here is the toolkit, in rough order of difficulty. Each move takes a phrase the reader can finish in their sleep and refuses to finish it the expected way. The reader's small jolt of corrected expectation is the whole game.
- Literalize it. Take the cliche at exact word value and follow the consequences. 'At a loss for words' becomes a poem where words are physically misplaced: the speaker finds 'stay' behind the fridge, months too late. 'Carrying a torch' becomes an actual torch, and now the poem gets to ask what keeps it lit and what it has burned.
- Extend it past its comfort zone. The cliche stops where it always stops; you keep going. Everyone says time heals all wounds. Fine: what kind of doctor is time, exactly? Does it have a waiting room? Does it botch the stitches? The cliche's first step is dead, but its second and third steps have never been taken.
- Swap one load-bearing word. Keep the cliche's skeleton so the reader hears the original underneath, then fracture it. 'Absence makes the heart grow careful.' 'Blood is thicker than forgiveness.' The reader's ear expects the old word, receives the new one, and both meanings ring at once like adjacent piano keys.
- Argue with it. Put the cliche in the poem as an accusation and let the speaker fight. A grief poem that opens 'They say time heals all wounds' and spends twenty lines producing the counter-evidence has instant structure: thesis handed to you by the culture, rebuttal supplied by your life. Poems built on the theme of love respond especially well to this move, since love owns more cliches than any other subject and every reader arrives pre-loaded with them.
A Worked Edit From My Own Desk
Let me show the difference on the page. Draft-speak version first, the kind of stanza that arrives by the dozen every month:
They say that time heals all our wounds,
and slowly I am mending too,
my broken heart will beat again
as skies of grey turn back to blue.
Four cliches in four lines, all used at face value, all asking for credit they have not earned since roughly 1850. Now the same material after move two, extension. Take 'time heals' seriously as medicine and push:
Time heals, they say. Nobody mentions
it works without anesthetic,
that it sets the bone a little crooked
so you can predict the rain with your grief.
Notice the cliche is still present. I did not avoid it; I quoted it and then walked past the point where it usually stops. The crooked bone and the rain-aching joint are just the literal consequences of taking the metaphor seriously, and the reader gets the specific pleasure of watching a phrase they have heard ten thousand times produce something they have never heard once.
The Entry That Made Me a Believer
The poem I mentioned at the start arrived in an autumn round. Subject: a stroke, a father losing language. The poet opened with the deadest phrase available, 'at a loss for words', and then literalized it for thirty lines. The father's words were lost the way keys are lost: 'spoon' went first, found again for a week, gone for good by March. 'The names of his daughters rolled somewhere under the bed.' The last line, and I am paraphrasing from memory because the exact one is the poet's, had the speaker still searching the house after the funeral, checking coat pockets for one particular word.
I gave it the highest creativity score I had awarded in months, and here is the point: the raw material was the single most exhausted phrase in the language of illness. The poem did not succeed despite the cliche. It succeeded by taking the cliche more seriously than anyone had bothered to. At Writory every entrant sees their five-criteria breakdown, and I have noticed the creativity and language scores jump most often on exactly this move, a dead phrase resurrected in plain view. If you have a draft that does this, the monthly round runs from the 1st to the 25th and you can submit it and watch how it scores.
The Cliche Inventory: Tonight's Exercise
Do not wait for cliches to sneak into a draft. Farm them deliberately.
- List ten cliches native to your poem's subject. Grief, love, homeland, whatever it is. Speed matters; write the ones everyone knows.
- Cross out the three you cannot hear anymore even when you try. Some phrases are too dead even for resurrection.
- Pick one survivor and run all four moves on it, two lines each: literalize, extend, swap a word, argue. Eight lines, ten minutes.
- Keep whichever version surprised you while writing it. Your surprise is the reader's surprise at one remove.
- Check the leftover cliches in your current draft. Any you are not actively subverting still get the old treatment: cut and replace with something seen, not said. Subversion is a license for the cliches you use on purpose, never an amnesty for the accidental ones.
That last point deserves its own sentence, because I can already hear the misreading. An unexamined 'heart of gold' in stanza two is still a flat tire. The moves above only work when the reader can feel your intent, and intent shows up as pressure: the cliche bent, broken, argued with, taken literally. Left alone, it is just a cliche again.
Shared Ground Is the Point
Here is the deeper reason subversion outperforms avoidance, and it is worth carrying into every poem you write. A cliche is the one patch of ground you and a total stranger both already stand on. Avoid it and you meet the reader nowhere in particular. Subvert it and you meet them on familiar ground, then move the ground.
That movement, the known thing made suddenly unknown, is close to a working definition of poetry itself. The dead phrase is not your enemy. It is your reader's expectation, gift-wrapped and delivered to your desk in advance. Some poets send the gift back unopened and call it craft. Open it. Rewire it. Hand it back ticking.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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