Metaphor, poetry, and ...junk jewelry

At left, a detail of a piece of sculpture in Ithaca, New York, made from assorted salvaged metal. I liked how the cog in the mouth says "teeth" -- a visual metaphor!

I've been seeing a lot about the importance of metaphor lately:

• The book Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson): "Metaphor is as much a part of our functioning as our sense of touch..."

• A review of I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (James Geary): "...metaphors are a key to how we think and may often determine our thinking without our knowing it."

• Poet Robert Frost (from the essay Education by Poetry): "...unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere."

Maybe this explains the attraction of making things with found objects. And why I love the potential of junk jewelry to make visual metaphors.

Robert Frost: "Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets."