A poet constantly zooms through transparent boundaries. No clichés. Every line floats on its own organic design. A poet sometimes startles us with his wild talk, always making up new ways of saying things.
I think of Gregory Corso’s lines:
“O I would like to break my teeth / by means of expressing a radiator!”
Mexican poet Octavio Paz addresses this notion in a poem called “No More Cliches.” Paz, who died in 1998, won the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.
No More Clichés
Beautiful face
That like a daisy opens its petals to the sun
So do you
Open your face to me as I turn the page.
Enchanting smile
Any man would be under your spell,
Oh, beauty of a magazine.
How many poems have been written to you?
How many Dantes have written to you, Beatrice?
To your obsessive illusion
To your manufactured fantasy.
But today I won’t make one more Cliché
And write this poem to you.
No, no more clichés.
This poem is dedicated to those women
Whose beauty is in their charm,
In their intelligence,
In their character,
Not on their fabricated looks.
This poem is to you women,
That like a Shahrazade wake up
Every day with a new story to tell,
A story that sings for change
That hopes for battles:
Battles for the love of the united flesh
Battles for passions aroused by a new day
Battle for the neglected rights
Or just battles to survive one more night.
Yes, to you women in a world of pain
To you, bright star in this ever-spending universe
To you, fighter of a thousand-and-one fights
To you, friend of my heart.
From now on, my head won’t look down to a magazine
Rather, it will contemplate the night
And its bright stars,
And so, no more clichés.
–Octavio Paz
