What is a poem? Or "How to Think about Writing and Reading Poetry"

Originally published in the Poet's Market by Writer's Digest Books under the title "Schematic for Sculpting Language."

Tara took this photo of a younger me writing a poem in Cafe Grecco in Rome where Wagner, Lord Byron, Keats, and Shelley wrote.

As a young man, I complained I didn’t get poetry. The poetry world seemed broken in two: those who rhymed and those who didn’t. Rhymers chose their path either out of too much ignorance (“all I know is roses are red; violets are blue”) or too much intelligence (“poema means ‘formed thing’ in Greek, therefore abide by forms”). Non-rhymers reacted against them, but did so without a compass, writing anything and everything as long as it didn’t look, sound, or taste like a poem.

This begged the question: were some free verse poems even poems?

I’ve come to enjoy all kinds of poems but this canyon separating poets scares many would-be-poets. Some novices stumble upon rhyming poems, something they can see or hear, and wonder, “is poetry about good sounds?” Other novices hear free-form poems that focus on metaphor and they wonder, “is poetry only about metaphor?”

I suppose the answer to both is “yes.”

We’ll start with free verse poets who make fun of the “roses are red” crowd. They do have a point. John Milton made the same critique as those poets, but Milton made it against his contemporary English poets in 1667. He did so at the start of Paradise Lost. Milton said most poets use rhyme “to set-off wretched matter and lame metre” and that some of the best English poems exclude “the jingling sound of like endings.”

Like Kendrick, Milton could throw shade. Though Milton would have thrown shade at both Kendrick and Drake for focusing only on rhyme. However Milton’s deeper point is something Kendrick seems to understand well:

If we must rhyme, we must consider our rhymes last. C.S. Lewis in his forward to Paradise Lost said, “Every poem can be considered in two ways – as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes. From the one point of view it is an expression of opinions and emotions; from the other, it is an organization of words which exists to produce a particular kind of patterned experience in the readers.” Your opinions and emotions form your poem’s soul – what critics parse apart – but its patterns incarnate your opinions and emotions by giving your reader an experience. A thrill. A chill in the spine. Blend that up with Milton’s thoughts and you’ll discover a schematic for any poem you ever want to write or understand ::

1. your opinion is matter

2. your emotion is metaphor

3. patterned experience is metered phono-aesthetics

4. …that sometimes rhyme.

Or perhaps show how rhyme is more than just “hop on Pop.”

Some will disagree with my list. Before you do, consider this :: (1) without good subject matter, your poem means nothing, (2) without good metaphor to emulate matter, your poem isn’t poetry, (3) without some sort of meter — even purposeful arrhythmia — the poetic experience holds no shock, no rapture, no art (4) specific rhyming phono-aesthetics (the art of like sounds) follows the rest like a bright red caboose.

Matter.

It’s the most restrictive element of any poem, the size of your canvas. With solid matter, the reader knows we’re talking about this and not that. Genre is part of this, but so is opinion. For instance, some comedy writing schools teach students to pick a subject and pair it with a personal angle ::

angle on a subject

• hopeful :: divorce

• despairing :: cheese

• devious :: waterfall

Basically, they teach this launchpad so comedians can quickly arrive at opinion expressed. Without a subject, you’re a potter without clay. Even if you write about non-entity, nihilism, or antimatter, those still count as poetic subject matter (and, frankly, even philosophically depend upon existence, but that’s another conversation with Bulgakov for another day). The Psalms of Scripture transcend more languages than any other book of poems by being the poetry of ideas — they don’t require metrical sounds to work. They only play with matter and metaphor, comparing and contrasting them or emphasizing them with epizeuxis. Start somewhere other than subject matter and your poem’s more than meaningless. It’s uninspired, the breath kicked clean out of it. Without it, what you write doesn’t matter.

Metaphor.

Poetry, as vessel for birthing and begetting language, draws virility from metaphor. Good matter illuminated by new metaphor is poetry. Nothing else is essential. From Hebrew parallelism to modern free verse, dozens of forms rely on little more than matter and metaphor. Free verse poems that fail, fail because they’re either about nothing or about nothing interesting. Metaphor’s the second bit. We might use the phrase “figures of speech” or “personification,” but it’s the figure — the person — of the birth of the new name (noun) or “stringing together” (verb) that we’re after.¹

Mixed metaphor is metaphor. Granted, some whip up bad mixes, which gave rise to the rule for prose about mixing metaphors. The best illustration I have for good mixed metaphor is in a poem I wrote titled

Silt ::

–they (Germanic tribes)
had this word
broka
means “marsh”
sounds like a “mocha”

I’ve wondered whether
brauchen – “to
use”
like “digest”
– is related to bruch…

Our world’s stomach
acid eats
soil
away from
stones, anxiety

beats us, erodes or
uses us
well,
how The Brook
deltas Marshland’s clothes.

Old English men came
to use broc:
stream
in a marsh.
So new words arose:

The Poet tramps through
the marsh then
home
to help his
Misses cook a meal,

drops a plate down
on a stone
where,
shattered, it
reminds him of broc.

He points. Says, “Broc.” Writes.
His village cites.
Then
citation
stops. Revises its source:

Broke. (A word is born).
Two words: one
head,
then mouth. One
spank, then follows sound.

One life-giving muse,
one ruin:
brook
(marsh’s veins)
broke (penniless; pain)

We come to now, to
towns how named,
races
split… 
or
regenerated.

We ask our borough:
what is this?
What’s this?
Oh which will you be, today,
dear Brooklyn?

As all phrases are metaphors at heart, a modern metaphor like “broken barn” depends on two Old English metaphors. The first called a shattered plate “broc” as in “brook-like.” The second meant “barley house.” So “in that brook-like barley house were born calves” is a fair line of alliterative meter. Language is metaphor, in the end. This is a basic tenet in semiotics, the symbolism of language, what Noam Chomsky calls our massive “evolutionary leap.” In Narnia, Aslan makes a distinction between animals and Animals by giving one set language — a normal horse knows grass is grass and a Narnian horse says to a badger that grass reminds her of fur. As Bulgakov would say, “Personal consciousness of self is proper to the nature of spirit.” Language compares one thing to another so the speaker can build a relationship with the hearer, so the speaker can express self and have self reflected back in an act of linguistic communion. “Here, this is me. You may experience me, now.” Every sentence in a given language mixes metaphors (words), but poetry invents new mixtures. The better the mix, the better the poem. In the case of the broken barn, this particular mix of metaphors has become cliché or common language, so we could reverse the river of etymology to create something new ::

brook through the barley house
its whiskeyrafts of grain

…in place of “broken barn.” If I have deferred this new metaphor to subject matter about losing my family’s farm, I could be on the right track…

Meter.

Submit whatever form — rhythm or arrhythmia — you hope for your poem to metaphor. Once you have, then think through the form. You may have decided ahead of time, “I’m going to write a sonnet.” Luckily, after time many of these meters will be internalized, but prior to that, you will need to make sure your metaphors are clear before closing a form. Ideally, all four happen at once as the act of both reading and writing a poem is always already all of these categories at once: you cannot in the highest act of composition or consumption of poetry parse out these four. When you encounter meter as a master poet or merely a reader, you encounter metaphor and its subject matter (in for a dollar in for a dime is inseparable at first blush, though we may abstractly separate its components later).

But we’re writing primarily to folks who want to understand the nature of a poem as well as those who are trying to find a gateway drug into the craft. For now, with your subject matter and metaphor in mind, find a pace that fits the opinion and emotion behind your budding work. Taste the difference between iambic and trochaic. Analyze the meter in seemingly meterless pieces like Ashbery’s Litany or Lee’s Porcine Canticles.

Buy a copy of The Book of Forms and write a poem in every style. Or, if you prefer a more direct and less thorough route, browse through Wikipedia’s category for poetic forms and make an attempt of the same meter, the same metaphor, in every form.

Then pick an appropriate (or glaringly inappropriate) form for your work in progress and stick to it. Pick a form and stick with it. If you start to use sounds, rhyme or otherwise that limit your chosen form, don’t let them. Discipline them like children in the sense of “teach” — gently help them to understand the nature of the poem you’re writing. Pace limits sound, but sounds don’t have to limit pace. Break those sounds on the crags of your patterns and meter. Let those crags stand on the bedrock of your metaphors. Let that bedrock hide the volcanic core of your subject matter. This solidifies the poetry into patterned experiences, historical moments we call “art.”

Phono-aesthetics.

Half of all bad poems tried to jam square rhymes into round meters. Specific sounds follow general meter. Granted, meter is a kind of sound, but it’s the sound that makes the rhythm of language. Rhyme and rhythm share the same root word, so understandably we often mix them up. Rhythm (meter) can include rhyme, but encompasses phono-aesthetics. Phono-aesthetics (the art of sounds) sometimes includes rhyme, sometimes dissonance, sometimes phantom rhyme, but all sounds defer to meter — the beat of your song, the pace of your phrasing.

In fact, we’re often in disagreement over the nature of rhyme. I tried making this point to some of Brandon Sanderson’s fans and publishing team in response to his character Wit, who said in Tress of the Emerald Sea that it was “impossible to rhyme with bulb.” Rising to the challenge, I wrote:

Sanderson said that you can’t rhyme with bulb —
Rhyming in lexicons often agree.
Neither considered the mulberry tree,
the bulbil of leaf axils, deeper medula’s
bulbar paralysis (my Vegas nerve):
the verve of the mid-word dueling rhyme
is better than slanting on pulp bulbously.

And so this gets into the nature of what is rhyme? If we simply mean perfect rhyme, then we fill the field of potential rhymes with weeds of dead words: perfect rhyme is exceedingly rare when compared to every other breed. That’s why we call it “perfect.”

But that’s not all there is to rhyme. I’ll pull directly from Wikipedia here because, frankly, I’m short on time and it does a good enough job for our purposes:

Perfect rhymes

Main article: Perfect rhyme

Perfect rhymes can be classified by the location of the final stressed syllable.

• single, also known as masculine: a rhyme in which the stress is on the final syllable of the words (rhyme, sublime)

• double, also known as feminine: a rhyme in which the stress is on the penultimate (second from last) syllable of the words (picky, tricky)

• dactylic: a rhyme in which the stress is on the antepenultimate (third from last) syllable (amorous, glamorous)

Feminine and dactylic rhymes may also be realized as compound (or mosaic) rhymes (poet, know it).

General rhymes

In the general sense, general rhyme can refer to various kinds of phonetic similarity between words, and the use of such similar-sounding words in organizing verse. Rhymes in this general sense are classified according to the degree and manner of the phonetic similarity:

• syllabic: a rhyme in which the last syllable of each word sounds the same but does not necessarily contain stressed vowels. (cleaver, silver, or pitter, patter; the final syllable of the words bottle and fiddle is /l/, a liquid consonant.)

• imperfect (or near): a rhyme between a stressed and an unstressed syllable. (wing, caring)

• weak (or unaccented): a rhyme between two sets of one or more unstressed syllables. (hammer, carpenter)

• semirhyme: a rhyme with an extra syllable on one word. (bend, ending)

• forced (or oblique): a rhyme with an imperfect match in sound. (green, fiend; one, thumb)

• assonance: matching vowels. (shake, hate) Assonance is sometimes referred to as slant rhymes, along with consonance.

• consonance: matching consonants. (rabies, robbers)

• half rhyme (or slant rhyme): matching final consonants. (hand , lend)

• pararhyme: all consonants match. (tick, tock)

• alliteration (or head rhyme): matching initial consonants. (ship, short)

Identical rhymes

Identical rhymes are considered less than perfect in English poetry; but are valued more highly in other literatures such as, for example, rime riche in French poetry.

Though homophones and homonyms satisfy the first condition for rhyming—that is, that the stressed vowel sound is the same—they do not satisfy the second: that the preceding consonant be different. As stated above, in a perfect rhyme the last stressed vowel and all following sounds are identical in both words.

If the sound preceding the stressed vowel is also identical, the rhyme is sometimes considered to be inferior and not a perfect rhyme after all. An example of such a super-rhyme or "more than perfect rhyme" is the identical rhyme, in which not only the vowels but also the onsets of the rhyming syllables are identical, as in gun and begun. Punning rhymes, such as bare and bear are also identical rhymes. The rhyme may extend even farther back than the last stressed vowel. If it extends all the way to the beginning of the line, so that there are two lines that sound very similar or identical, it is called a holorhyme ("For I scream/For ice cream").

In poetics these would be considered identity, rather than rhyme.

Eye rhyme

Main article: Eye rhyme

Eye rhymes or sight rhymes or spelling rhymes refer to similarity in spelling but not in sound where the final sounds are spelled identically but pronounced differently.^[8] Examples in English are cough, bough, and love, move.

Some early written poetry appears to contain these, but in many cases the words used rhymed at the time of writing, and subsequent changes in pronunciation have meant that the rhyme is now lost.

Mind rhyme

Main article: Mind rhyme

Mind rhyme is a kind of substitution rhyme similar to rhyming slang, but it is less generally codified and is "heard" only when generated by a specific verse context. For instance, "this sugar is neat / and tastes so sour." If a reader or listener thinks of the word "sweet" instead of "sour," a mind rhyme has occurred.

Classification by position

Rhymes may be classified according to their position in the verse:

• Tail rhyme (also called end rhyme or rime couée) is a rhyme in the final syllable(s) of a verse (the most common kind).

• Internal rhyme occurs when a word or phrase in the interior of a line rhymes with a word or phrase at the end of a line, or within a different line.

• Off-centered rhyme is a type of internal rhyme occurring in unexpected places in a given line. This is sometimes called a misplaced-rhyme scheme or a spoken word rhyme style.

• Holorime, mentioned above, occurs when two entire lines have the same sound.

• Echo rhyme occurs when the same syllable endings are utilized (example: disease/ease).

• Broken rhyme is a type of enjambement producing a rhyme by dividing a word at the line break of a poem to make a rhyme with the end word of another line.

• Cross rhyme matches a sound or sounds at the end of a line with the same sound or sounds in the middle of the following (or preceding) line.

A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyming lines in a poem.

And this is all before we get to rhymes in other languages.

For your rhyme and meter:

Experiment with sounds, like and unlike alike. Draw broadly from rap and Old Norse, from the aisling and roundel. Pay attention to origins because words derived from French land differently on the ear than those derived from Arabic – an eagle is not an albatross, after all. Ask Coleridge’s Mariner.

So what is a poem?

Taken together and in that order, these four categories compose your poem. With this, we put words in the right order and create new language.

So what?

So here’s why all of us need to get and make poetry:

Language is an organism — a symbiont (a la sign, signifier, signified), but still an organism. If language ever dies, humanity dies. On the smaller scale, the day poets stop begetting and birthing new English metaphors will be the very day English dies. Language and culture are inseparable like the widow who follows her husband into the grave one week after he passes. Culture is what we make from where we are in order to build community and the first part of community is communication: this is why creative writing stands at the crossroads of the arts (manual and fine; applied and productive) and sciences (queen and handmaid; higher, and lower). American English in particular is suffering death-by-palliative care when compared to the eighteenth century. We, unlike Iceland, did not create new English words for new break-throughs whether medical or militant. We stole words from other languages and butchered them for ours and stopped tending our own garden. And yet, that garden still thrives.

If the phrase “everyone’s a poet” actually inspired Americans, we’d be set. The problem? Few read poetry and almost no one considers himself a poet — even among poets. I met a girl the Friday before the original draft of this piece who read her poetry at a poetry reading that featured three very competent writers in this uber-hip library in Brooklyn and she said, “I’m not good enough to call myself a poet. I just write poems.”

What does that even mean? Imagine someone painting an entire house and saying, “I’m not good enough to call myself a house painter, I just paint houses.” Particularly when that phrase becomes a metaphor: I heard you paint houses…

Offering the power of language creation to three hundred million Americans who consider themselves non-poets is like taking a daycare full of children who haven’t learned the concept “death” and arming them with assault rifles. God forbid anyone do that, but the meaning is clear: death will find them anyways, knowing or unknowing, bidden or unbidden.

If you think I’m being superlative, just check out how many word origins have N.S. beside them in the dictionary: National Socialist, Nazi. The moment the language shifts, the culture shifts. Hitler’s power was his poetry. Or, rather, lack thereof.

Considering recent developments, that should sober you.

At the forefront of our sea of ignorant language creators stand the copywriters. I know. I was one of them. It paid well, but we slaughtered the great phrases of the world on an altar of barcodes. Mother Theresa’s Be the change you want to see in the world has become Be the person buying printer cartridges you want to see in the world. You can’t say, “I’m loving it” without thinking about shitty cheeseburgers. These small attacks have added up to a full-scale coup in our language. Left alone and unaided, hers is a death of ten thousand advertisements and elisions and transliterations.

But whatever you think, do not become one of those who believes the lie that there’s no money in poetry.

Our poets are fabulously wealthy. They simply prostitute their talents to make phrases like “the best part of waking up is Folger’s in your cup” and “Nationwide is on your side.”

Jingles.

Good God, Milton was right. We set-off wretched matter and lame metre with the jingling sound of like endings in order to sell more coffee and insurance.

If you’re thinking that’s not poetry, then perhaps we should make our poets fabulously wealthy writing something else.

Of course, that would mean first persuading our corporations to stop advertising. And our consumers to stop buying what’s advertised. Chesterton made this very point in his Utopia of Usurers:

Most people have seen a picture called “Bubbles,” which is used for the advertisement of a celebrated soap, a small cake of which is introduced into the pictorial design. And anybody with an instinct for design (the caricaturist of the Daily Herald, for instance), will guess that it was not originally a part of the design. He will see that the cake of soap destroys the picture as a picture; as much as if the cake of soap had been used to Scrub off the paint. Small as it is, it breaks and confuses the whole balance of objects in the composition. I offer no judgment here upon Millais’s action in the matter; in fact, I do not know what it was. The important point for me at the moment is that the picture was not painted for the soap, but the soap added to the picture.

And the spirit of the corrupting change which has separated us from that Victorian epoch can be best seen in this: that the Victorian atmosphere, with all its faults, did not permit such a style of patronage to pass as a matter of course. Michael Angelo may have been proud to have helped an emperor or a pope; though, indeed, I think he was prouder than they were on his own account. I do not believe Sir John Millais was proud of having helped a soap-boiler. I do not say he thought it wrong; but he was not proud of it.

And that marks precisely the change from his time to our own. Our merchants have really adopted the style of merchant princes. They have begun openly to dominate the civilisation of the State, as the emperors and popes openly dominated in Italy. In Millais’s time, broadly speaking, art was supposed to mean good art; advertisement was supposed to mean inferior art.

I should say the first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement. I do not necessarily mean that there will be no good art; much of it might be, much of it already is, very good art. You may put it, if you please, in the form that there has been a vast improvement in advertisements.

The improvement of advertisements is the degradation of artists. It is their degradation for this clear and vital reason: that the artist will work, not only to please the rich, but only to increase their riches; which is a considerable step lower. After all, it was as a human being that a pope took pleasure in a cartoon of Raphael or a prince took pleasure in a statuette of Cellini. The prince paid for the statuette; but he did not expect the statuette to pay him. It is my impression that no cake of soap can be found anywhere in the cartoons which the Pope ordered of Raphael. And no one who knows the small-minded cynicism of our plutocracy, its secrecy, its gambling spirit, its contempt of conscience, can doubt that the artist-advertiser will often be assisting enterprises over which he will have no moral control, and of which he could feel no moral approval.

He will be working to spread quack medicines, queer investments; and will work for Marconi instead of Medici. And to this base ingenuity he will have to bend the proudest and purest of the virtues of the intellect, the power to attract his brethren, and the noble duty of praise. For that picture by Millais is a very allegorical picture. It is almost a prophecy of what uses are awaiting the beauty of the child unborn. The praise will be of a kind that may correctly be called soap; and the enterprises of a kind that may truly be described as Bubbles.

Poets are fabulously wealthy in our era. You absolutely can make money making poetry. You simply have to become Don Draper. Yet we all have this nagging in the back of our mind: what good is it for a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his self?

It’s Faustian, our American poetry.

And so.

What you have to do is stop spending money on advertisements and on what’s advertised. Every time you see an advertisement, buy a poem that isn’t advertising or give money to a poet who isn’t a copywriter instead. That small habit will change the culture for ever. See an ad? Give 50¢ or 25¢ to a poet. That’s about what it cost the advertiser to show it to you.

Of course, as referenced above with Kendrick and Eminem, a good chunk of our dollars for poets go to those simply reciting poetry over drums. It’s partly that a specific tradition of poetry now reins. To make money at it, you could become a rapper. Or do what Tolkien and Rothfuss did: just sneak them into your novels.

As C.D. Wright says in Cooling Time:

It’s harder for me to feel that dreamy about poetry nowadays. The art is thoroughly divorced from the multi-million–dollar spectacles that play to the numbers, and entropically inclined from within. It does hang in there. Poetry will not go quietly.

You would have to starve it out, and it can live on very little.

Let’s put some meat on the bones of our language again. Speak of a new world, poets. Frame the world aright. Birth a new society pregnant with a thousand possibilities with your every poem. Plato feared this and expelled every poet from Athens. One of the most important Ukrainians leading the revolution of 2014 was a 26-year-old poet who said, “This is not a garden party. This is a revolution.” He changed their language. Consider the trajectory and you’ll see what I mean.

You too. Set your mind on creating a better language for our great-grandchildren. This is poetry.

If no one has yet, I commission you. I hereby arm you to the teeth with a tiny, but effective, schematic for writing and understanding poems. What is a poem? It’s what’s the matter with us enough to make a new metaphor sing. Go speak of a tomorrow stripped clean of the pieces of today you hate. In Perelandra, Lewis tells us of a world that has no word for “murder” or “vanity.” What if we woke up tomorrow and discovered that in the middle of the night, American poets had rendered just two words — “rape” and “genocide” — meaningless, as meaning less than words like “respect” and “reconcile” ?

In the end, write poetry not to publish. Obviously by publishing this article and my own poem in a book about publishing poems by Writer’s Digest, I pray you can and do publish.

But don’t write for that.

No, no, write poetry to ensnare your reader in one historic moment so deep that if they ever escape, they’ll remember forever the good we offer the world. This isn’t just a schematic for poetry, it’s a schematic for tomorrow. As Rilke said, “Because you must.” This is humanity, this is art: to find our Self standing at our unique intersection of relationships and offer up to the world all of the good we find in the midst of that intersection using a language we create and teach others to speak. What we make from where we are in order to build community.

This isn’t a schematic for poetry. It’s a schematic for tomorrow:

1. Things that matter

2. expressed in moving metaphor

3. through memorable meter

4. made beautiful by phono-aesthetics.

That’s a poem.

And for better or worse, poetry is how you own your tomorrow in the teeth of Charles Schwab’s slogan.

1. An erudite and accomplished poet went back and forth with me over email on this point and I would like to rehearse some of that debate here in the footnotes with his name redacted, but arguments preserved. Why? I think it might both clarify my point and show others another way of saying all of the above. Again, I sold the original a decade ago, so finessing it for 2025 Lancelot is no surprise to me.

He said, “A poem is a piece of literature (written or oral) that is structured according to some sort of rhythmic principle and sound patterning.” And argued that rhythm is essential (with many examples, some of which were new to me — I didn’t know, having not studied Hebrew prolifically, though able to read it, that many Psalms were also based on meter, though I still think it’s primarily a matter and metaphor poem).

He would say that if it hasn’t got rhythm, it isn’t a poem. That rhythm is the main thing.

It seems to me that free verse poems are metrical on a line-by-line basis. So it's less about the meter of the piece and more about the disparate interactions of different meters. If you ask me, that fits the tone and tenor of the chiaroscuro world events of the twentieth century. Other free verse poems are not metrical, but are certainly still poems: not all of Mary Oliver is metrical. But I defy anyone to make a sensible argument for how Mary Oliver was not a poet of the highest caliber. I often think of CD Wright's line: "Imagine flying in concrete." It's almost a Buddhist koan, but it does work too, I think, as poetry. And hers are all prose poems with almost no meter to speak of, but so many of her lines resonate so deeply with me. And they are not prose, not at all.

Can you find a poem without a metaphor? I don't think so because it's using language. And language is metaphor. In other words, I'm making a Trivium argument: logic embodied in grammar through the rhetoric of meter.

What I mean by metaphor is a word that "carries across" meaning from one phenomenon to another. The metatrope is personification and all of its various contraries (reification, apostrophe, sermonicio, etc). I think it's impossible to find a poem without this. I mean, I was alliterating in the original piece (Matter, Metaphor, Meter...), but if we’re asking if by “metaphor” I mean merely instances of, for instance, "the moon was cheese," the answer is not merely metaphor because that doesn't include all figuration, all prosopopeia. The making and unmaking of faces is what I'm after, a la Paxon's Poetics of Personification out of Cambridge. Figuration and disfiguration, personification and depersonification, makes up the life cycle of any given word. Poetry is the means by which new words are born. That's why the word "noun" means, first and foremost, "name." As in "true name." The making of names is poetry. The ending of the persons behind those names is academic abstraction. Words are born from extraction by poetry and they return to abstraction. One of the big reasons our culture is suffering right now is because we're quite good at killing new words and diluting our rhetoric, but rather bad at birthing new words.

So use "figure of speech" if you like, but pay attention to that word "figure." Or "personification," but pay attention to the "person" part: it's the act of carrying through from one meaning to another new one, of birthing a new "person," a new "noun" and therefore a new "name," a new "binding" or "stringing together" (verb > verbe > verbum > ῥῆμᾰ > εἴρω) for reference:

https://lanceschaubert.substack.com/p/the-economy-of-stories-in-the-name

Two of the examples my interlocutor used were these:

An epicure dining at Crewe
Found a rather large mouse in his stew.
Cried the waiter, "Don't shout
And wave it about,
Or the rest will be wanting one too!"

Is there a metaphor in there? How about this:

There was a young girl called Renée
Who had nothing pleasant to say,
So her mother got mad
And said she was bad
And made her sit in the corner all day.

In the first limerick, the figure, were I to give him a name, is "Mouse Stew Jealousy." That is a phrase I never thought I'd utter. It's why comedy works too, which is a kind of poetry (another topic entirely, but "finding the funny" is this same process of configuration — "When life gives you melons, you might be dyslexic" reconfigures "melons" to mean "lemons" through the poetic imposition of dyslexia at the last possible moment, marking a sort of happy boundary violation of language so that we laugh as much at ourselves as anything for the shared context, recontextualized. It also happens to have a clear meter: -/--/--/--/-)

In the second limerick, the name Renée is a French form of Rene for Renatus, a Latin name that literally means "born again." I can easily read the second as a meta trope of either Penance or Hypocrisy. I would easily title that poem "Renatus." It surely is a metaphor in that sense.

Does this mean this can't happen in prose?

Well as admitted above, novelists often do slip into poetry, both formally and informally, so of course it can insofar as a narrative includes a poem within it or moves into a poetic register. That subsuming doesn't preclude the definition I'm offering, I don't wager, anymore than the definition of a rectangle precludes the definition of a square. In fact, rectangles often subsume squares, depending on the square in question:

This is where the square / rectangle metaphor breaks down: I would argue a new configuration of language is unique to poetry whereas it is not necessary for prose, which often resorts to cliche and reification. I chose "configuration" carefully, etymologically.

The more I think about this, the more I think I would simply ask: what distinguishes poetry from the set of vocal music containing scat, beat boxing, thillana, nigunim, puirt a beul, etc.?

Follow ups:

What distinguishes poetry from music?
What distinguishes music from song?
What distinguishes song from poetry?

I think those questions in the Greimas semiotic square show why I think both matter and figure distinguish poetry.

And at that point, I would appeal to C.S. Lewis's argument against E. M. W. Tillyard in The Personal Heresy: a poem isn't just about rhythm, nor about the poet, but about what the poet is looking at. That’s a “discerning moment” of something they saw. Or, in other words, a new name for an old thing. The birth of nouns and verbs.