Cliches versus Idioms

[Exit]

I think "conscious choice" is the key, at least for me. And the same goes for many other poetic devices. When the poet is properly aware of context, has a specific intent and owns it, he can get away with much more than a novice churning them out willy nilly.

I entirely agree. The problem is, that "conscious choice" depends on at least two things. 1) that you have made it clear in the poem that it was a conscious choice—which can often defeat the purpose of doing it. Or 2) You're (insert any well-established writer here).

I disagree there's a problem. You don't have to be an established writer to consciously and effectively use cliche to advance a poem's mood, setting or plot. And if you have the skills to do that, I doubt very much you'd feel the need to announce it for slower readers. Cliches and idioms are as much a part of the language as metaphor and allusion. None of them succeeds without full consideration by the writer.

Firstly, I should have said "at least one of two things" and not "at least two things". 
Given that, if you are an established writer people intuitively read you "as if" you are making conscious choices. So an established writer can break the rules and will be analyzed more closely rather than written-off as ignorant of the rules. To give a heavy-handed example, Picasso was already an established painter before Les Demoiselles d'Avignon—everyone knew he could "do the rules" and paint. So it wasn't a case of "oh we can dismiss this for being amateur and uneducated"—critics (and fellow artists) had to assume he painted it that way for a "reason". Which irritated a lot of them. Mattisse called it a joke. Finnegans Wake was the same. Everyone hated it. But the fact that both these works of original art came from established artists—love them or hate them—had to be taken seriously. 
That's one.
Secondly, by "making it clear" I didn't mean to imply that the author should explicitly say "hey, I just did gone done me a cliche there, it was supposed to be like that". I meant that it should be somewhat clear to the reader (idiots notwithstanding) that you have broken a rule (the "cliche rule" in this case) purposefully—knowingly. You know why most people look at a Picasso or a Basquiat or a Joyce or even a Beckett and think "I could do that"? It's because they don't quite understand why they couldn't.

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Caesar probably said "kai su, teknon" [και συ τεκνον]... just saying, you might want to be a bit less ready to call people "semi-educated".

anyway, with regard to cliche, one surely wants to avoid them, unless that's part of it, part of the thing, part of the style, the conscious choice. Idioms are slightly different, as they are often regional or date specific. "Et tu, Brute!" is a cliche in literary circles. But if your eastern European cleaner said it to you... it's contextual. I say, write what you want. Cliche, boring, derivative. It doesn't matter. No one aims for originality anymore, so why bother. As long as you have a thousand little thumbs-up, you're golden.

Ugh, an Eastern European cleaning lady. OF COURSE!

Now, my Mexican cleaning lady is well-versed in Greek and always shouts, "kai su, teknon" when she burns her finger flipping the tortillas she cooks me. Because Latin too easy for her, isn’t it?

No, I would say that she knows that Julius Caesar would have spoken Greek and not Latin, because like most upper-class Romans at the time he was a pretentious prick—something of which I would know nothing about.