Structure & Surprise

A nice little shout-out in Edward Hirsch’s A Poet’s Glossary: at the conclusion of the entry for “cliché” (wait! it gets better!), Hirsch notes:

Clichés deaden and abuse language; they blunt ideas.  Yet the cliché, so often banished by literary arbiters, also has its creative uses….In Structure & Surprise (2007), Michael Theune identifies a “Cliché-and-Critique Structure” in poems that “strategically incorporate clichés to make their meanings.”  Such poems as Walt Whitman’s “Death’s Valley” (1892) and John Ashbery’s “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” (1987) begin with a cliché, which they then turn back to critique.  (113-114)

Very cool.  Nice to be included in this important book.  Many thanks, Edward Hirsch!