Cliches

[busker]

There is the unintended use of cliche, and there is the deliberate use of it with the purpose of finding something new
In the lines

We are born to die
and love between 
the two mysteries.


The first one is of course a cliche, and if it were a stand alone sentence, it would have to be thrown out.
But birth and death are the two great mysteries bookending what is actually the third great mystery (though neurobiologists would dispute that) of love.
There's a contrast between that and the cliched L1, which (at least in theory) subverts the expectation of the reader 

Maybe it worked, and maybe it didn't....but the interesting question is - can cliches be used in a way so as to produce a-ha moments?

[Miley]

iirc subverting cliches was one of the interesting devices in José Saramago's novel Blindness.  More in the sense of like.. proverbs, or folk sayings.

[Kynaston Levitt]

I entirely agree that there is a place for cliché. It shouldn't be dismissed simply for being cliché. But, conceptually, the "something new" you have "found" is also a cliché.

"We were born to die" Lana Del Rey 2012.

"life is a mystery" Madonna 1989.

"all you need is love" John Lennon 1967.

You really have to dig in deep to turn the cliché on it's head. Not just reiterate it using more cliches.

[busker]

I entirely agree that there is a place for cliché. It shouldn't be dismissed simply for being cliché. But, conceptually, the "something new" you have "found" is also a cliché.

"We were born to die" Lana Del Rey 2012.

"life is a mystery" Madonna 1989.

"all you need is love" John Lennon 1967.

You really have to dig in deep to turn the cliché on it's head. Not just reiterate it using more cliches.

I think it’s somewhat startling that there are examples of where people have said the same thing over the years. Taken to its logical conclusion, the only real poetry would have to be written in an entirely new language each time, much the same way that Capablanca had suggested adding pieces to the chessboard decades before there was a Deep Blue.

[Kynaston Levitt]

Why would you want to say the "next" same thing? Or, why would anyone want to read it? if everything you wrote was just a poor copy of something someone else said better, why would you bother writing it? The best love poems or love songs don't say what you've already heard about being in love. They say "I wanna hold your hand" (before that was a popular concept) and "comes in bells your servant, don't forsake him". Originality should be the artists' ambition. The best poets make me think something different, not "I've heard this a million times before... and better." What's  more disturbing, a spider crawling into ones mouth or crawling out of it?

[busker]

Why would you want to say the "next" same thing? Or, why would anyone want to read it? if everything you wrote was just a poor copy of something someone else said better, why would you bother writing it? The best love poems or love songs don't say what you've already heard about being in love. They say "I wanna hold your hand" (before that was a popular concept) and "comes in bells your servant, don't forsake him". Originality should be the artists' ambition. The best poets make me think something different, not "I've heard this a million times before... and better." What's  more disturbing, a spider crawling into ones mouth or crawling out of it?

If the word or phrase is a common one, then the reader would have heard it a hundred times before, no doubt. If there was nothing more to it than repeating what someone said, then it wouldn’t make sense to do it. But let’s take ‘we are born to die’.
‘We were born to die, and we live’: 2 Corinthians 6:9
‘We were born to die’ - Romeo and Juliet Act 4 Sc 3
‘Whatever is begotten, born, and dies’ - Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium
‘All things were born/ Ye will come never more/For all things must die.’ - Tennyson
(No Lana Del Ray, thank you very much)

[RiverNotch]

To try and "systematize" discerning whether a cliché is well-employed or not, I suppose the two things an artist should be when employing a cliché is to be both confident and credible. The artist must either fully commit to the cliché they employ, or else they must fully commit to the irony of their employment -- anything less, and they'll betray their anxiety over their supposed lack of either intelligence or originality, an anxiety which would make the reader question whether the poem is even worth their time. At the same time, the artist must understand the full breadth of meanings and other employments behind the cliché they employ as much as they can, otherwise their employment will end up being awkward or journeyman-like. Shakespeare's use of "born to die" is ironic, I think, as it comes from the mouth of Juliet's father, when Juliet refuses to meet with Paris -- think Polonius's aphorisms, as he parts with Paris -- and, in that sense, it works very well. Looking at the Lana del Rey song, it seems to be your usual postmodern pop single -- it literally starts with "Feet don't fail me now" -- only I'm not sure it really works, as at this point in her career I'm not sure she'd adequately built up her whole "I'm a white girl who loves the 1950s-1970s, but I understand how problematic that era was" schtick yet. Similarly, Ed Sheeran's employment of the somewhat cliché term "shape" in the song "Shape of You" is banal to no end, especially when he tries to dancehall it up in the whitest way possible, whereas Perfume Genius's employment of the term in the song "Slip Away" feels a lot more credible, if one comes to it with an understanding of the artist's Crohn's disease and his experiences with homophobia and domestic abuse. But in all this, I am reminded of my experience reading Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness. One of the main characters, Estraven, speaks frequently in clichés....and yet it works so well, to the point that they sound rather poetic, partly because Estraven clearly understands the clichés he employs, coming to such an understanding naturally, and partly because the novel is also science fiction, with Estraven coming from an entirely fictional world: his proverbs and aphorisms are cliché to him, with the text constantly being explicit about their being so, yet they are entirely new to the reader, being Le Guin's inventions (or translations from other, less well-known cultures -- her parents were renowned anthropologists, and I understand she herself studied other languages).

[busker]

One of the things I like about this forum is the reading list!
Had never heard of Le Guin. Will give a try m.