Our everyday speech is salted and peppered with poetry. Swear words are poetry. They pour verbal gasoline on whatever linguistic fire we have started. Compare “I hate you” with “F . . . you”. Which has more emotional punch? Every time we use ‘like’ to compare one thing with another, a poetic event is present even if a poem is not. Repeated poetic events quickly become clichés. The first Irishman to say “Top of the morning to you” was creating a poetic event. The next ten to use the phrase were hitchhiking on a formulaic phrase – a cliché. With the instant mind-to-finger keyboard communications of today, clichés become iconic emojis, acronyms, (LOL, POTUS, SUV) and abbreviations (fridge/refrigerator, meds/medicines, veggies/vegetables). Poetic phrasing is the natural inclination of speakers in daily life. We speakers are interested in being interesting, even if our interesting speech is heavily borrowed from platitudes and profanity. These are a lazy way to create colorful speech.
Henry Ford’s first mass production automobile, the prosaic model T, quickly became poetized into the “Tin Lizzie” and the “Flivver”. Wanting to be in control of the naming process, car companies began offering their own poet-powered names. We now drive Ford Mustangs, Chevy Impalas, and Dodge Rams. The names evoke animal strength and beauty.
But poetry is alive in all of us, at least most of us. Anyone who uses profanity, alliteration, onomatopoeia, simile or metaphor is on the edge of poetry. The poetic urge begins to fail when a person becomes comfortable with a familiar use of words. That’s when laziness transforms language into cliché. The poet in particular is allergic to stale language. She or he is constantly searching for a new way of saying a new thing. The poet is not satisfied until a new order of words releases a new order of thinking. Life yearns to express itself and finds a working artist to speak on its behalf. When life wants to use words, life finds a poet, or if one is not readily available, life creates a poet.
That is how important poetry is to life.