Cliche
One of the most frequent pieces of advice given to new writers is to avoid cliche. Of course, we also tell them to learn the rules of grammar and syntax, structure their persuasive essays “Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion,” and avoid long sentences. You’ll notice that I literally broke every one of those rules just now, starting with the first words in the sentence.
The truth is, you don’t have to avoid cliche in your writing or your poetry. But your work is going to feel tired and boring if you’re not aware of the cliches you’re using, and you don’t take steps to subvert them.
Metaphor what?
But this month’s poetry slam is about metaphor, not cliche, so why am I rambling on like this? Because we’re not just using metaphors. We’re using unexpected metaphors. And to make an unexpected metaphor, you need to set some expectations. Cliches are really good at that, aren’t they? If you see a single tear, it tells you something about the emotional state (and angst level) of the person crying. If you see a bouquet of red roses, it means love, sweet love. But watch out: when you say “the driver’s side of the car” what you mean may depend on where you (and your reader) are!
Okay okay so what’s a metaphor?
It’s using one thing to stand in for another. Like “here is a rose” (or “as you wish”) for “I love you.” Or “the baby had apple cheeks.” The kid isn’t actually covered in fruit, you’re using a metaphor.
To subvert that metaphor, you need to play with the reader’s expectations. For example, the baby with apple cheeks? The story or poem might continue with “also peas and carrots, because it was dinner time.” Now you’ve taken the reader’s expectation that “apple cheeks” is a description, and subverted it.
Because it’s February, our example poem this month is one of the most famous subverted metaphors in English literature… and one of the most famous sonnets.
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
How does Sonnet 18 subvert a metaphor?
I’m glad you asked.
Everyone has an image of a summer’s day in mind, right? It’s hot, there’s some flowers, some grass maybe. Even if you grew up in a desert like me, you’ve been exposed to the “traditional” image of the summer’s day, which was not coincidentally developed in the homeland of the sonnet I just forced you to read.
But the subject of the poem is… not like a summer’s day. The reader enters the poem expecting “ah, your eyes are blue like the sky, and your hair is golden as the sun, and your attitude as cheerful” and gets something entirely different! Not just because it turns out that the subject isn’t at all like the summer cliche, but because the summer isn’t like summer either.
Your turn!
To write a poem that subverts a metaphor, it helps to start with one. Your metaphor can be expected (the apple-cheeked baby) or unexpected (“’Well, you keep away from her, cause she’s a rattrap if I ever seen one.’” —Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck). The important thing is that your reader understands that you’re comparing two things.
It might help you to make a list. For example, to write about that baby I would make a list like this:
Baby’s cheeks = apples
apples are: a) cliche red, round, sweet, juicy, b) actually crunchy, sour, green, speckled, full of worms
Then I’d start writing about the baby. To make my metaphor unexpected, since it’s a pretty normal comparison, I’d need to either start writing about how the baby’s cheeks were NOT like cliche apples, or how they WERE like real apples. Which might mean that the baby is an alien. I don’t know. I came up with this metaphor half an hour ago and it’s not very developed.
Here are a few more examples of unexpected metaphor to get you started:
The bicycle, like all boats, was…
He handed her a rose on the 14th of February, so of course it was peach-colored.
I love you like oil loves water.
Rules of the slam
Write a poem in any form, using an unexpected metaphor. Unexpected metaphors will distance themselves from cliche either through negative comparison or through subverting the cliche itself.
Bonus points: Do it as a sonnet. You can use any type of sonnet, but it may help to tag your work Spenserian or Petrarchan or whatever if you want better feedback on your rhyme scheme.
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
