So the folks at the Virginia Quarterly Review tried to write a blog post about how writing about poetic cliches will get you nowhere, only to find it will apparently get you into the VQR. Check out their terrifying (on any number of levels) post about it here; I’ve reproduced their handy table below:

Submitted Published
Water 19.9% 24.8%
Death 14.1 15.2
Blood 11.7 13.8
Stone 11.1 16.0
Bone 9.1 7.8
Poetry 7.6 10.3
Heart 7.5 6.7
Fish 7.0 5.3
Birth 5.5 7.4
Darkness 3.9 17.0
Rust 3.3 2.5
Cat 2.3 2.8

I think the worst part of this for me is realizing how many of these I absolutely am guilty of writing about way too much. Apparently, though, I just haven’t been writing about them in the right combination. So, a poem about a fish boning a cat to death it is…