14/12/2025
A post copied from Sunshine Coast Writers.
What is an “after” poem? – by Jeanne Griggs
A poem with “after” and another poet’s name underneath the title is an “after” poem.
A good example is Jane Zwart’s “All my Life I was a Bride married to Amazement,” after Mary Oliver’s “When Death Comes.”
Identifying a previous poem that a new poem is “after” indicates an attempt to recall some part of the feeling that the previous poem conveys and build on it.
Writing an after poem is an attempt to arouse the memory of that previous poem in order to reveal another perspective on it or even to twist and turn it into something quite different.
An after poem is not an imitation but a transformation; it is a continuing conversation about an idea or image or form of some previous poem. All poems are written in response to previous poems, to some extent; an “after” poem makes the act of response explicit.
You are invited to recall what came before and to appreciate the transformation of any borrowed language. An “after” poem uses some of the words from another poem for its own purposes.
The lines used within after poems work differently from the way an epigraph works. The definition of “epigraph” in the Poets.org glossary of poetic terms is “a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions to suggest its theme.” T.S. Eliot uses an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno to set the stage for his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
The effect of lines used by previous poets also differs from allusion, which can reference an idea from the literature of the past to remind you of its previous context. “Allusion” is defined in the Poetry Foundation’s “glossary of poetic terms” as “a brief, intentional reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, or movement.”
In Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Disquieting Muses,” she alludes to the story of Sleeping Beauty to help readers see through the speaker’s eyes some of what the mother has failed to do for her child.
The effect of the borrowed lines in an after poem is also different from mention, which is specific. Paisley Rekdal’s poem “Intimacy” mentions the movie The Fly. W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” mentions Brueghel’s painting titled Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
An after poem should transform the bits of poetic language that have been borrowed by putting them into a new context and bringing them into a new era.
(Jeanne Griggs is a reader, writer, traveller, and violinist. She directed the writing center at Kenyon College from 1991-2022. )
