Pith & Patois: lingo as a starting point for a poem (3.12.22)

Vernacular, colloquialism, idiom, slang . . . in its many forms, this aspect of language is so close to the language of poetry as to be (maybe) the untranslatable je ne sais quoi stuff of poetry.  We've addressed it variously over the years, mainly by talking about figurative language generally, and more particularly here and here.

For us, the patois of our poem is preferable only if partnered with pithiness, that is, it's perfectly fine to deploy a cliché, idiomatic phrase, colloquialism, piece of jargon, a "familiar," so long as we deploy it packed with meaning for the poem we're writing.  And that does NOT include, usually, mere cleverness.  (I'm one day soon going to write a piece here about cleverness in poems, because I abhor it.  And you might or might not be surprised how often cleverness creeps into the poems of even the most celebrated writers.)

But this week's project.

We're writing a poem that uses some form of untranslatable English as our foundation.  This can be anything, as I've tried to indicate above, from cliché to saw to proverb.  By "untranslatable" I mean anything in a language that carries such subtle meaning as to be impossible to communicate in any other language.  The figure I use above in the first paragraph, je ne sais quoi, is a pretty good example.  Sure, you can transliterate it into English as "I don't know what," but to the French historical and cultural context is everything when it comes to French idioms, patois, lingo, bywords and the like.  Just as it is to native speakers of English, or Russian, or Vietnamese.  It's the nativist part of your lexicon.

And context is the idea in this week's project: taking a figure of speech or a proverbial saying or expression and rendering it anew in some new context.  Now hear this: your first impulse may be to take an expression like "ignorance is bliss" or "a bird in hand is better than two in the bush" or "catch as catch can" and humorize it.  Make a ha-ha poem out of it.  Please   The give it a more serious try in the first draft or two.  The poem you write may very well turn out to be funny, but it should be funny even without the figure.  Funny should be the essence of the poem (NOTE TO SELF: ANOTHER TOPIC FOR A BLOG POSTING: CAN POETRY BE FUNNY?). 

Maybe I'm beginning to confuse you now by over explaining.  I'm certainly confusing myself!

So, let's just leave it at this: write a poem that deploys a common figure of speech in some new context.  Your objective is to reintroduce us, as it were, to the expression.

Good luck!