The Woodlot

By Chris Banks

Cliché is the Big Box Store of Poetry: utilitarian, generic, and taints the very community it claims to serve. Like a virus, poetic cliché multiplies exponentially, but ultimately devalues the very thing it wishes to sell, which is the goods. A new way of looking at life. What Blake might have called ‘Poetic Genius’, or what I might just call good ole fashioned poetic attention.

The difference between a cliché and a well-turned image in a poem is the difference between a warm bubble bath at home, and a pedicure treatment with Champagne at the Fairmont Royal York. The one might feel good, but no one cares but you. The other is the more Instagram-worthy moment. The one that will garner more “likes” in the long run.

When I was fifteen, we moved away from Sioux Lookout, Ontario. It was a little Northern town with one dirt Main Street and a candy store named Gertie’s that sat beside a dirty Auto Body shop. To get to Sioux Lookout, you had to turn off the TransCanada Highway, and drive ninety minutes north on a rugged spartan highway full of nothing but evergreens and lakes and rocks and bald eagles.

My father, a provincial police officer, had been recently transferred south to Stayner, Ontario, a town which sits about an hour away from Toronto nestled in the foothills of the Niagara Escarpment near Georgian Bay.

I remember showing up to that first day of high school down South, and being horrified to find out that my Hudson Bay’s Brady Bunch wardrobe was horribly out of fashion by the standards of my new peers who had access to huge pedestrian walking malls full of United Colours of Benetton and BeaverCanoe in the nearby city of Barrie. I remember coming home in tears, and my mom taking me shopping that afternoon. I bought a Roots sweatshirt, two pairs of Edwin jeans, and a few other designer branded T-shirts to get me through that first week of school.

For the next two years, I was a walking billboard for Eighties branded clothing. Polo, Tretorn, Ocean Pacific, Calvin Klein, Swatch watches. I moussed my hair. I bought the long Le Chateau trench coat with huge shoulder patches. I imagined myself as an extra in a John Hughes movie.

What I did not know then, but what I know now, is that my need to belong had made me a teenage cliché: a preppie kid with the personality and depth of a Gap television commercial. This changed in Grade Twelve when I threw out my Ralph Lauren branded sweaters and dungarees, and started shopping at the Salvation Army store. I bought used men’s shoes, had my mom sew a big yellow ‘W’ on a green polyester sport coat, and grew my hair out. I finished the ensemble by wearing a giant “pirate” gold earring in my left ear.

Why the wardrobe change? I was tired of looking like everyone else. I had recently started reading poetry—first Jim Morrison’s The New Creatures which was terrible, but then afterwards Leonard Cohen’s Spicebox of Earth and Margaret Atwood’s The Circle Game—and I wanted to suddenly live a “creative” life. But how?

The first poem I ever wrote was called “Cellophane Hearts” and I was seventeen. It was the usual teenage drivel. A girl I had dated at a summer camp where I worked as a counsellor had dumped me, and I had feelings about it.

The human heart breaks. So it goes. But a broken heart is a poetic cliché. How to make it new? Ah! A Cellophane Heart! In disrepair! That’s the ticket!

It didn’t matter that the subject matter of my first poem was also an ABC Network “After-School Special” trope. I had figured out with my first poem that some poetic clichés could be flipped on their head and subverted. You don’t fall in love. You fall through it. That kind of thing.

I wrote terrible poems for two years and continued to shop at Value Village, and the Black Market on Queen Street in Toronto. Most days I wore a bright orange tartan plaid suit jacket with green tapered work pants, until finally I was ready to move to the Megalopolis of Guelph, Ontario for university. Up to the age of nineteen, I had lived in small villages of under five thousand people. Guelph was the big city.

At Guelph, I studied English and Canadian poetry, and continued to write middling poems for four four long years, but with enough quirky, “inventive” images that had made some of my University professors take notice. My teachers Tim Struthers and Donna Palmateer Pennee both recommended me for the Creative Writing Masters Degree at Concordia University in Montreal, and I got in.

I can tell you with all certainty I was “green-lit” because of their recommendation letters, and not because of my cringe-worthy sampling of my poems entitled Children of Fire, Children of Sea. A recent obsession with Gwendolyn MacEwen had me writing vatic poems reminiscent of MacEwen, but without the allure and mystery and genius of her work.

I was again writing poetic clichés.

It is hard to go it alone when you are a young person. You want so much to write. At the same time, you want so much to be universally loved. Or at least I did. That pressure left me with all the originality and flavour of a generic can of soda. I started to feel really intimidated by the younger poets I was meeting in Montreal who were equally as talented, if not more talented, than myself. People like Sina Queyras and Carmine Starnino who both went on to become brilliant poets in their own right.

At Guelph, I had been a local hipster celebrity. A name whispered about at Open Mic Nights and Fine Art Bashes. A Great White Shark in a small city aquarium. But in Montreal, I was perfectly forgettable.

In the three years I attended Montreal, I ended up breaking my heart (yet again!), acquiring a near daily taste for strong beer in tall aluminium cans, and wrote my first poetry collection In The Galleria of Missing Persons which was my Master’s thesis. The title was interesting, but most of the poetry wasn’t. Not yet. I shelved the book.

One of the poems “Meditations On The Human Heart” was still riffing on that most abused of poetic images: the human heart. The human heart is a plague ship swimming in a crimson sea. The human heart is a stone tower with no costume of ivy. The human heart is a mason jar full of rusty nails. And so on.

I had not yet the experience, nor the courage, to move beyond the solid foundation most clichés provide for a poem. Cliché is comforting. Boring, but comforting. I did not yet have the confidence to try to put one over on a reader. I did not yet want to fully jump into the gap between meaning and metaphor with some fresh new line or image that was unique, mischievous, uncontaminated by other influences.

In time, I became a better writer and honed a ‘pleasing’ poetic voice. My first poetry book Bonfires won a National Award in Canada mainly because of how similar it was to other older poets, like Lorna Crozier or Patrick Lane. The reviews came out and noted, although well written, how similar my book was to the two generations of Canadian poets who came before me.

I felt like an ambassador of banality. I vowed to read more widely, and deeply. For six months after winning the CAA poetry prize, I walked into big city poetry readings where I was greeted with stares of envy and loosely veiled contempt. It was not a nice feeling. I began to drink uncontrollably.

How do we avoid poetic cliché? Or poetic influence when it is reading other poetry that carries us along on our journey to becoming a poet in our own right? Well, in terms of influence, influence is unavoidable. But shine a light on poetic clichés, and they scatter like cockroaches.

When we talk of poetic invention, how unique or surprising a particular poet happens to be, we can either use gangly poetic terms like ‘negative capability’ coined by Keats to describe the fertile imagination of Shakespeare, or we can use simpler language like ‘first thought, weird thought’, to try to shake us of habituated patterns of thinking which is the artificial reef clichés inhabit, but I much prefer what the poet and short story writer Raymond Carver said in his Collected Stories which is basically there is plenty of talent to go around, but “a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.”

I have thought about Carver’s words of wisdom for over twenty years, and I think it is healthy to remember even Shakespeare, that poster boy of negative capability, was responsible for a few bad clichés. Anyone remember the terrible “life-rendering Pelican“ line from Hamlet? It makes me snicker when I hear it. Or do you remember why Hamlet returns so quickly to Denmark after leaving by ship for England? You guessed it….Pirates! This is hilariously bad. Why not a Time machine? Or even a Dallas “Who Shot J.R. it-was-all-just-a-dream” plot device?

Instead of diminishing his greatness, I think Shakespeare’s clichés make him all the more human.

So what am I saying? I’m saying Ixnay on the Cliché. Avoid poetic clichés in your writing at all costs, and if they cannot be avoided, then twist them, subvert them, make them do your bidding which is how I can write a line like “Gather your Travel Points While You May” with a straight face. Some clichés burrow deeper than others. Some only can be seen in retrospect after many, many years.

At fifty three years of age, I am a father, a teacher, a poet, a son, a life partner. These terms are ready clichés certainly, but these are the ones I can live with. Poetic clichés, the ones to avoid, wrap your poetry in cling-wrap, and instead of preserving any sense of freshness, they embalm it. Pull the cellophane away from your heart. Tear open the vacuum seal of your soul.

All you can do is try. “The readiness is all”, says Prince Hamlet who was more concerned with killing his uncle Claudius, the King, than what I called earlier ‘poetic attention’. Poetic attention is trying to pass, maybe not a camel through the eye of a needle, but certainly a sailboat, or a mountain, or a high-school prom.

All poetic attention to me is a little ‘razzle-dazzle’. A little tinsel, bright neon signs, and ready-made wisdom that hopefully enters a poem before its inevitable conclusion.

When I first started writing poems as a young person, as a freckled teenager dreaming of becoming the next Jim Morrison or Leonard Cohen, I constantly thought about my poetic subjects and slowly, painfully composed my lines, afraid to offend or to write anything too off the wall. Too outré.

Now, I usually sit down to write without any clear idea of what I want to write, or sometimes I deliberately write on a subject that I know very little, or nothing about. DNA. Piano montages in movies. Ivory Towers.

I tend to write quickly, and edit forcefully. Often I hear the voice of the American poet Richard Hugo in my ears: “Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.” Don’t like Richard Hugo? Well then, listen to that other great teacher of poetry, the American poet Theodore Roethke who said ”Talent talks. Genius does.”

Miraculously, I have gotten to a point in my writing life (I won’t call it a career) where people actually care if I put out another poetry book, and I have a small but devoted stable of readers that show up to small independent bookstores to hear me read poems. My books are reviewed in National newspapers, periodicals and online websites. This is more than most poets can hope for in these modern days of fewer Arts grants, and an overall lack of visible support for OG middle-aged working poets, so I claim what little fortune and advantages poetry has been kind enough to give me over the years.

But none of this would exist if I had still listened to the siren-song of poetic cliché trying to steer my poems onto the rocks of folksy quaintness, or worse, yawning indifference. Strum the irrational; not synaptic connections worn so deep in our brains they have carved a permanent groove into our poetics.

To be viewed as an individual does not require you to wear an orange tartan plaid suit jacket, or to wear second-hand black combat boots, which trust me is just another type of uniform young people wear out in public. But you do have to bait creativity with a fair amount of patience, and abject failure, if one is going to avoid the pitfalls of poetic cliché, and plug your poetry into a source of knowledge and understanding that is greater than oneself.

Call it negative capability. Call it a bonfire of surprises and delights. Call it a fax machine dialling the stars. Cliché is trying to walk in untied shoes. The poetic imagination, freed of poetic cliché, is a full-sprint 100 yard dash. A golden Byzantine city. A way of seeing.

Works Cited

Carver, Raymond. Collected Short Stories. Definitive ed. ed., Library of America, 2009.
Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town: Lectures And Essays On Poetry And Writing. WW Norton, 2010.
Roethke, Theodore. On poetry and craft: selected prose of Theodore Roethke. Copper Canyon Press, 2001.