Poems inspired by other poems typically have the epigraph ‘after’ to acknowledge the influence. Here I am excluding ekphrastic poetry, that based on works of plastic art, as that’s a whole other thing and another essay, even if these too use the word after in their epigraphs.
It seems to me that the point is to innovate and write something very different from the poem that has inspired you.. After poems are something many poets write both as part of learning the craft and engaging with poetry more widely. There may be occasions to play with the reader, to write a poem as in-joke or puzzle, a tease, although in this case an end note away from the poem page in a collection would suffice as credit to the originating author whilst retaining the mystery of the poem. There is after all, nothing new under the sun, but closely copying someone else’s work will bring trouble. If you want to be totally safe, choose a long dead poet with out of copyright work.
After poems are everywhere. Pick up any contemporary collection and the chances are you’ll find one. So what then is the purpose and intention of such writing? There are many different approaches or combination of approaches being adopted and it helps perhaps to try to sort and comment on some of these. But one fundamental question to consider as we go along is, why? Why do you need to do this? Does it help you to write your best poem? If it hinders you, then perhaps you might be best finding another way of working.
1. Engaging with the canon
It is necessary to recognise that taking on others’ poems, canonical or not, brings with it the baggage of the earlier poem. For example, just purely in terms of subject matter, if you want to write a poem about a nightingale, it’s as well to have Keats in view, so you know what you are up against in the reader’s mind and the expectations they will bring to it. Ditto daffodils and Wordsworth, or death and the villanelle and Dylan Thomas, and so on.
Take this poem of mine:
Berkeley Square planes[i]
I don’t believe nightingales sang here
and I need something solid in this
sticky shade,
not full-throated ease and plaintive anthems
fading far away, dissolving
and making me quite forget.
Give me mottled trunks, flaking only to save us
from soot, and branches baubled
in celebration;
our rescue from the smog, they’re banishers
of the pea souper,
rebuffers of lung burn and cough,
visions more dappled and magnificent
than any waking dream.
Here I’m punning on the wartime song about nightingales singing in Berkeley Square, as well as using some elements of Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ but the poem isn’t really about nightingales or Keats’ writing about them. It’s about the trees, and the birds are there for poetic context and associative language. So it’s not an after poem per se, but one that uses elements of the canon that are so well known that there was, in my view, no need to reference or credit them.
I hope in this poem that I selected some things the reader is likely to know, or be able to find easily. If the source poem that you are writing after it’s too obscure, is there much point in writing it, as hardly anyone will get it? Similarly an after poem that just gives the originating poet’s name is unhelpful to the reader without a deep knowledge of that particular poet’s oeuvre. Often I’m left scratching my head as to which particular poem (and sometimes which poet) is being referenced. Why not throw me a lifeline? Why assume I know, or indeed care? An end note should do it, but bear in mind that first and foremost, I’m there to engage with the poem you have written.
It’s probably unwise to assume your reader will trouble themselves to look up anything at all. Why should they need to? Shouldn’t your poem be sufficient unto itself? Again this is part of the big why question with these kinds of approaches. And while we are on this point, do avoid too much intellectual showing off. No-one likes or is impressed by this. It’s probably better to wear your learning modestly, unless you are arrogant enough to be writing solely for the very few people in your readership who might be equipped with the knowledge to follow your obscure references. In which case good luck, and not having the time for such goose chasing, I’m off.
2. Varying response types
These might be anywhere along the spectrum from praising the source poet, to them making you so incensed to need to challenge them. Friend, A.F. Harrold once read out a poem at an open mic I was attending that had me doing just that. I’m afraid I can’t recall the title of his poem, but its contents had something to do with rewriting Genesis, having Adam sleeping under hedges in Reading and the like. I was stirred, as Eve didn’t appear in his poem at all. So in response I penned this:
Stolen Fruit[ii]
For a few hours I knew infinitely
more than you; my eyes were open wide
and I’d found out all there was. I could see
that this was perfect and beautiful,
while all you saw was a place called garden
and you couldn’t even name the flowers.
For those short hours I tripped about,
happy for the first time, happy the word
I made for it. But as I slept contented
beneath passion fruit, clematis and vines,
you stole the cool plums from my palms and bit
through their bruises into gold, yielding flesh.
Your sons have been raiding ice boxes ever since,
always sorry and thinking they know best.
Not only am I responding to Harrold, but I’m rewriting and adding to the Bible and taking a side swipe at William Carlos Williams. Some arrogance, you might say, but it’s all in a day’s work for the after poet and I have had audiences cheer this one.
Talking back and other ways of interacting the poetry canon are well worked approaches and knowingly done. Carol Ann Duffy commissioned a whole anthology[iii] on this, which is worth your while taking a look at. A poem as dialogue or in conversation with an earlier poet/poem should be just that, and engagement with the subject matter, terms of expression and so on. Mimicry does not a conversation make any more than some people’s habit of repeating what you just said back to you - mirror talking - is having a meaningful exchange. Find a way of talking back and discovering new meanings.
Take for example this short poem:
Ophelia[iv]
By the time she really died
there were no flowers left, no pansies
fennel or rue, no violets, no daisies,
no-one remembered rosemary.
Her Sisters laid her bird body
on grey chapel marble, surrounded
her with stag’s horn and moss,
with ceps, morels, ink caps.
Beneath was a slick of kelp
and bladderwrack, oarweed
and dulse, her salty slipway
to river’s mouth and the tide.
Here I have taken on the mighty Bard writing a longer life for poor Ophelia, even if she did end up in a nunnery with flowerless plants as tribute. This is a well-used feminist approach and it subverts and reinterprets Shakespeare’s narrative of her demise.
Going somewhere else quite other from the starting point of someone else’s poem is a way of exploring other angles and possibilities in the source work. For example, this poem prompted by Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence’ (or in his earlier version, ‘The Leech Gatherer’) concerns itself with medicine, illness and sex:
The Sanguine Leech[v]
I wait for you in the peat-coloured stream
under a rusted stone.
I wait for you to want my juicy kiss,
for you to want me to suck hard.
For now one of my serrated mouths
is fixed firmly on petrified blood.
As the moon waxes
I’ll swim in hungry circles.
Patient am I and you are grateful
that I stuck around, suck around to stop
the clotting of your tiny veins, the day
they thought you’d closed your eyes for good.
3. Engaging with the language
This can involve such things as engaging with the poet’s language and general style, and/or the language of a particular poem. Take this riff on Christina Rossetti’s ‘In the Deep Midwinter.’ The enjoyment that I hope readers derive from this comes from knowing Rossetti’s poem/much sung carol, and seeing what I have chosen to do with it.
The barn swallow’s carol[vi]
Families gather, but as you come to sing
by the child’s crib, I’m far off on the wing,
so long gone south-due-south into the Berg
wind, not hidden, torpid, not cold-air hung.
I don’t know of hoar frost, or snow on snow
on snow. Earth-iron, water-stone
are mysteries. Bleak ice makes no moan.
I’m swallow, what gifts can I bring? Fat gnats,
thick mud, new nets from fynbos or Cape Flats.
Midwinter/mid-summer, all I can share:
the dip-dive, the soar-swoop in fresh-fly air.
Carol Ann Duffy liked it enough to include in her selection of Christmas poems for Candlestick Press in 2012. That’s sufficient endorsement for me.
4. Using the actual language
Less obviously after poems, one might argue that poetic techniques that use the literal elements of others’ poems can fall into consideration here. There are many such:
Centos have been around for over 1,600 years. They are poems deriving entirely from others’ texts: from many poems by one poet, or poems by several poets. It’s probably best to use no less than half a line and no more than a full line in your stitching and watch out for copyright issues. Centos are an interesting intellectual exercise, but being overly faithful and denying yourself the ability to edit, alter and improve, do they add up to anything more than that? I once really upset someone in a workshop context, by daring to raise this point. Belated apologies to that person, although I haven’t much changed my mind.
Titles are copyright free to my understanding. Patchworking a number of them together to make a new poem is a ludic exercise that hopefully yields something of meaning greater than the sum of its parts. It is both a form of cento and a found poem that I have had fun with, although crediting every volume is unnecessary. Take this one, which is full of titles from books in the library at Ty Newydd (the National Writers Centre in Wales) with very little, if any, infilling:
Paraphernalia, a found poem[vii]
Tell me this is normal: eating strawberries
n the necropolis where Angolans are playing football,
morning in the burned house, evening brings everything back,
the unreliable mushrooms, the watermelon man,
telling each other it is possible.
Aubergine is a gravid woman, a two-part invention
home and away, the miracle diet, what she dis
an what she said, her name like the hours self-made.
And here in the menagerie: birds through a ceiling
of alabaster, ghosts at cockcrow, horses where answers
would have been like something flying backwards.
Can you hear, bird, the weather coming?
The banking thing, the back and forth of it,
the way the money goes, you again learning how to fall,
how to disappear, take me with you.
Using opening, closing or any intermediate lines as your opening, closing or any line is a minimalist approach to after-ing. Lines used are often in italics and credit given in end notes. Or you could start with such a line to write your poem and then delete the starting line. These are all well-worn workshop techniques to getting the poetry flowing.
Golden Shovels were invented by American poet, Terence Hayes just over fifteen years ago. The last word of each line when read down the page forms a second poem, the pre-existing poem being written into. In his 2010 collection Lighthead, Hayes’ poem ‘The Golden Shovel,’ uses Gwendolyn Brooks’ ‘We Real Cool,’ for example. They are a kind of cento, but it seems to me there is much more space for invention in writing them, especially writing towards that end word in each line. I’ve seen purists say they are only for tribute to Brooks, but why not go wider? Dylan Thomas is out of copyright now. Hold my non-alcoholic beer.
In lieu of exploring Thomas, here’s a recent unpublished one of mine:
Jardinage
A Golden Shovel based on a line from Gwedolyn Brook’s ‘Jessie Mitchell’s Mother’
I’ve always referred to the garden as mine,
though I wasn’t the one who put most of the work in.
You deserve more credit, fact,
for digging, pruning, composting and clearing because
you’ve more strength and energy than I
will ever have, or this is how it was
till the ladder broke you, my lovely,
and for a year the plot had
free reign. Odd, that meant more flowers.
Erasure poems too are a kind of after, where a pre-existing poem has parts blacked out and sampled down to create a new poem from its text. Again, these are a lot of fun to do and there is a choice to be made as to how to present them on the page – in the original form with blocks of black ink, which have the effect of isolating the remaining words and drawing much attention to them, or rewriting the remainder as a more concise poem. I have seen both, and to avoid clunkiness must say I prefer the latter.
I’m sure there are more approaches and additional considerations to after-ing than I have sketched here, but hopefully these are plenty to be getting on with. Wishing you many happy ever afters.
Article consulted in preparing this essay:
Helena Nelson, ‘What are poets really after?’ The Friday Poem, 20.7.2023. (www.thefriadypoem/what-are-poets-really-after/ retrieved 12 August 2025.
Photographs from Namibia, November 2025 (my copyright).
Endnotes
[i] Kate Noakes, Goldhawk Road (Two Rivers Press, Reading, 2023).
[ii] Kate Noakes, Ocean to Interior (Might Erudite, London, 2007).
[iii] Carol Ann Duffy (ed), Answering Back:Living Poets Reply to Poetry of the Past (Picador, London, 2008).
[iv] Kate Noakes, Ocean to Interior (Might Erudite, London, 2007).
[v] Kate Noakes, Ocean to Interior (Might Erudite, London, 2007).
[vi] Kate Noakes, Cape Town (Eyewear Publishing, London, 2012).
[vii] Kate Noakes, Cape Town (Eyewear Publishing, London, 2012).
