Listening to Prevert

La meilleure façon de ne pas avancer est de suivre une idée fixe. The best way not to move forward is to pursue a fixed idea.
Jaques Prévert

I did have a pretty fixed idea to change the way AppleHouse worked and spent quite a lot of time researching online forums, getting as far as setting up three different ones but then deleting them in turn when they weren't as user friendly as this site, or were plagued by adverts.

It seemed that I couldn't find the right format for what I had in mind, so I've decided to drop my 'fixed idea', give the old AppleHouse blog a new look and carry on posting at least one exercise and prompt every month and commenting on as many of your poems as I can.

I hope you'll join me here for another AppleHouse season. And here's the first prompt for Autumn:


I discovered the poetry of Kay Ryan a few years ago, but only recently realised that she's the current US Poet Laureate. Her poems remind me of pressure cookers - tight forms that hold their words under such tension. One of her ways of working is to take a familiar expression, a cliche, or even an abstract concept and 'unpick' it, or explore it, in a poem. I really do recommend her work to you. Here's one example:

The Best of It

However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn’t matter that
our acre’s down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we’d rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.

My challenge to you is to write a poem around one of the following expressions or cliches:

Putting on a brave face
At the end of the day
All's well that ends well (I know Shakespeare wasn't 'cliche' in his time but this one has been done to death!)
One volunteer is better than ten pressed men
Pushing your luck
Under the weather

Try free-writing to get under the skin of the expression you choose. Dig deep. Find out what it's hiding. Go to a place where the words have more resonance than their familiar usage.

Good luck.

Poem Prompt 2 - Refreshing Cliché

Clichés abound in our spoken language though, generally, in poetry we tend to avoid them, unless, for example, we're using them deliberately in a persona poem to suggest character. The use of cliché, in this case, can serve to strengthen the reader's belief in the speaker. The use of cliché, or over familiar language, elsewhere can suggest that the poet hasn't worked hard enough to find their own way to express an idea and has fallen back on a communal 'shorthand'.

The American poet, Kay Ryan, consciously works with clichés and familiar expressions, often taking one as the title of a poem and freshening it in some way for the reader. She might 'interpret' it, or explore an idea behind it, usually with brevity (lots of her poems are less than 14lines long) and always with precision, lyricism and wit. I highly recommend her book The Niagara River.

In the following poem she explores the phrase 'green behind the ears', the ideas of youth, innocence, and nostalgia. Read this for inspiration and then, working with your own chosen familiar expression, explore the ideas behind it in a poem of not more than 14 lines.

Off the top of my head, the following clichés/phrases come to mind, but brainstorm for your own list too:

one volunteer is better than ten pressed men
don't count your chickens
beauty is in the eye of the beholder
sly as a fox
pretty in pink
dead men don't talk


Green Behind the Ears

I was still slightly
fuzzy in shady spots
and the tenderest lime.
It was lovely, as I
look back, but not
at the time. For it is
hard to be green and
take your turn as flesh.
So much freshness
to unlearn.

Kay Ryan
from The Niagara River
Grove Press New York 2005

Buy it at The Book Depository.