Clichérie

[cbertsch]

The other night at the Denali show, when my former student was talking to me about poetry, I tried to explain my undergraduate theory that it would be possible to write a great body of work solely by inverting the clichés of other writers. I explained all the work I'd done on Rilke and how he often seemed to be taking that approach, particularly in the New Poems.

In the course of the discussion, I thought of a little formulation:

I would love to become a cliché, but I don't want to be a cliché!

It's silly and obvious, to be sure, but still captures the basic philosophical distinction between being and becoming quite nicely. What do you do once you've arrived?

Comments

Delay

[cbertsch.livejournal.com]

I vividly remember the moment -- one I will surely cite on my blog more than once -- when I was travelling around Germany, sleeping on trains, and got in to so some provincial station in the middle of the night. It was a couple hours between trains, so I just hung out in the lobby and read.

Around 4am, the baseball-scoreboard-type, non-digital train destination sign swung over to reveal the message, "20 Minuten Verspätung," instead of announcing the arrival of the expected train. I thought, "Whatever." But the other three people on the platform were enraged.

Germans apparently believe that if they leave on time, they'll have a better chance of making it to that place in the sun.

I've always loved Bruce's ability to capture that strange nostalgia for a future that will never come that constitutes the Utopian side of our daily lives.

He's also good at dealing with clichés, as evidenced by the song "Local Hero."