Natalie Ann Holborow

When we write poetry, we’re trying to summon what’s real. Not the postcard version of life but uncovering the true layers behind what we observe – say, a limp bouquet, a coughing sob or a moth hammering a porch light – and persuading it to stand still long enough to reveal its truth. A poem has to earn this; it must split open the ordinary and let something emerge, fresh and alive. A poem isn’t supposed to be comforting in the way the familiar is; it’s supposed to pull you up short, knock you slightly off balance. 

It should make you pause and say, I’ve never thought of it like that before.

A poem can take something as small as a chipped teacup or as enormous as grief and make it vivid, sharp, unmistakably itself. Cliché does the opposite. You’ve seen it before, haven’t you? A “broken heart,” a “sea of stars,” a “wave of grief” – empty phrases, the bones sucked clean. When a writer leans on cliché, they’re letting the surface of the world stand in for what’s underneath it. 

And that’s where poetry really lives – in the depths, in the awkward angles, in the images that surprise us into paying attention.

Why cliché fails us

Cliché creeps into poetry because it’s easy. Writing is hard enough without interrogating every metaphor, every adjective, every simile. We reach for the familiar because it’s safe. Everyone knows what “the weight of the world on my shoulders” means, so when we’re struggling with a particular poem, it’s the easy line, the borrowed metaphor, the stand-in for something we’re too afraid or too tired to say.

But how can we pin an experience in such a way that the reader can say, yes, there it is; that’s what it looks like?

Let’s take a look at the work of Sharon Olds, for example, where she writes about being at her father’s bedside as he lay dying:

Every time he blinked, the powerful

wave of a blink moved through my body

as if God had blinked,

a world unmade in the jump of an eyelid.

Here, she resists the easy comparison or overused phrases (e.g., “a blink of an eye” or “a fleeting moment”) and instead stretches the image until it carries weight and power. It gets me every time. There’s a deeply personal resonance here, as if the act of the other person blinking has an almost unbearable emotional impact on her body and being. Instead of simply saying “I was shaken” or “it moved me,” she writes about how the blink is experienced viscerally, as a force through her body. And it’s this embodiment that makes it feel immediate and real.

It’s unnerving, vivid, undeniable. That’s the work poetry does. It doesn’t generalise; it insists on the truth of this moment, this body, this life.

How to avoid cliché

When you sit down to write, don’t reach for the right word. Start with the thing itself. What does the moment smell like, taste like, feel like in your body? Describe the way your child sleeps, the first sip of espresso in between meetings, the weight of your father’s coat.

Mona Arzi gives us moments so immediate we feel them in our bones. Take this excerpt from the poem In Newspaper:

My mother wrapped my cut-off plait in newspaper.

It might have waved its tail like a fish,

but it lay there, dignified.

Notice what Arzi does here. This sharp contrast between the imagined, animated “fish” and the still, lifeless braid grounds the moment. Instead of dramatising the loss or leaning on sentimentality, she reins in the emotion with the word “dignified.” The plait, now severed, is granted a quiet grace, a kind of solemn finality. By keeping the language simple and restrained, she gives each word weight and prevents the poem from slipping into sentimentality – but still, as readers we feel it.

Here are a few exercises you can try to strengthen your writing in the same way.

1. Go beyond the first thought

Write your first thought, and then cross it out. Sit with the moment longer. What does it actually feel like? For example, maybe sadness isn’t a void; maybe it’s more like a blue whale’s heart, as written in the poem Translations of Grief by the inimitable Kathryn Bevis:

…a blue whale’s heart

is the size of a Ford Fiesta: each chamber wide

enough for drowning a woman to pummel

herself against

Each chamber of the whale’s heart is described as being “wide enough for drowning.” This choice of words is unsettling and precise. Bevis sidesteps any soft or sentimental descriptions of the heart (no mentions of “life-giving” or “a steady beat”) and instead makes it a place of violence, a suffocating vastness where someone might “pummel herself against” the unyielding walls.

Bevis leans into precision, choosing language that is sharp, dark, and physical, rather than softening or abstracting the subject. By rejecting sentimentality and embracing the unsettling truth of the image, she delivers something original, alive, and deeply affecting. The result is a metaphor that surprises, disturbs, and lingers—exactly what good poetry should do.

Exercise: Choose something vast and awe-inspiring (e.g., a hurricane’s eye, the silence in a cathedral, the belly of a cargo ship) and compare it to something small and ordinary (e.g., a rusted mailbox, a ticking wristwatch, the hum of a vending machine). Then, introduce an emotion – grief, anger, longing – and place it inside the vast thing, giving it movement or action with concrete, unexpected verbs (e.g., shiver, gnaw, unravel). The goal is to craft imagery that feels alive, surprising, and true. See where it takes you.

2. Root emotion in the body

Cliché lives in abstraction – “sadness,” “anger,” “fear.” But poetry happens in the body, where emotions take up space and leave their mark. So write about the way grief sits in your throat, how fear makes your shoulders ache, how love is a muscle that trembles.

Rae Howells does this beautifully when she describes a sense of determination and a will to fight for the future of Clyne Common in South Wales:

But she’s not done yet. See how the lungs still stutter

and swell, every cut fringed with new bindweed, 

and here, when I part her ribs, how honeysuckle

springs up, how butterflies burst into life.

The act of “parting her ribs” is unsettlingly intimate. This isn’t a distant or passive observation of nature; it’s a physical interaction, almost surgical, forcing the reader to confront the land’s interior life. By writing about nature in such close, embodied terms, Howells avoids the predictable tropes of “Mother Nature” or “wounded earth.” Instead, she gives us something far more raw, tactile, and immediate.

3. Tell the truth (even when it’s ugly)

Cliché happens when we shy away from the truth – when we soften it, smooth it over. But poetry isn’t here to comfort us. It’s here to show us what’s real, even when it’s raw or unsettling.

Take Ocean Vuong’s Seventh Circle of Earth, for example, structured as entirely footnotes which adds to its haunting quality:

“1. On the night of the attack, I think of the boy’s body

[….]

2. Not the burnt attic—

3. but my hands twisting through the smoke.”

Vuong avoids graphic, sensationalized detail. Instead, he fragments the experience, reducing it to traces of memory and grief. The sparseness and disjointed structure mirror the impossibility of fully capturing such horror – and it’s this restraint makes the poem even more devastating.

Write what’s real

Avoiding cliché is about more than language. It’s about honesty. A good poem risks something—risks being raw, strange, vulnerable. Cliché keeps you safe; it lets you hide behind what’s already been said. But poetry isn’t safe. That’s why you remember the poems that startle you.

So when you write, don’t reach for what’s easy. Look harder. Dig deeper. Write what’s true—even if it trembles. Especially if it trembles. That’s where poetry lives.

And when you feel yourself slipping toward the familiar, stop. Cross it out. Start again. Keep writing until the words feel like something you’ve never seen before, but always known. Until they stand there on the page, wild and alive, ready to run.