Brooks Haxton: Cliché (July 2007)

In this informal lecture, Brooks Haxton asks what makes a cliché a cliché, and suggests that writers, while avoiding prefabricated speech, should seek the sources of cliché and reconsider our resistance to immediately conveyed thought.  Through close readings of poems by Leyb Borovick, e.e. Cummings, Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Paul Goodman and Philip Booth, Haxton considers how poets can present emotionally fraught material with unadorned directness, to powerful effect.