Notaphor?

I have a very fond relationship with metaphor.  As a writer, I enjoy clever wordplay, here defined as any comparison that makes me think, or forces me to look at an object or an idea in a new way.  

We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self. 

An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.  

Life is a verb, not a noun.  (all found in Dr. Mardy Grothe's I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like) 

I admit, though, I also enjoy laughing at bad metaphors.  Sometimes they are more descriptive than the good ones.  

You got further plucking the chicken in front of you than trying to start on one up a tree.  Especially when the tree was in another country, and there might not even be another chicken.  (This one I got from Wretched Writing by Ross and Kathryn Petras)

And then there are those metaphors that have become so ingrained into our language that we never think twice about them.  

All the world’s a stage.  

Less is more.  

Food for thought.

By definition, a metaphor identifies something as being the same as some other thing, usually unrelated, in order to make a rhetorical point.  Metaphors, then, are concerned with identity, with what something is.  Recently, however, I’ve been wondering if there is another side to metaphor.  Can you play with words by comparing something to what something else is not?

Billy Collins seems to think so.  He has a lovely poem called “Litany”, in which he makes fun of senseless metaphor.  “You are the bread and the knife,” he says, “the crystal goblet and the wine. …  However, you are not the wind in the orchard,/ the plums on the counter,/ or the house of cards./ And you are certainly not the pine-scented air./ There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.”

This poem always makes me laugh (listen to him read it!), but I wonder if I could take this thought a step further, and look at it a bit more seriously.  Things are often defined by what they are not; not-being sets a boundary, making what is clearer.  And if we are looking at words in a poetic sense, it is just as interesting (to me, at least) to say that a person should not be a cobweb, or that a story should not be a yawn.  A woman is not meant to be hollow.  Words are not dogs—they don’t come when called.

Just thinking out loud, really.  But it does open up a lot of possibilities, don’t you think?